User reviews

Posse is a stylish but messy modern yet revisionist black western from actor/director Mario Van Peebles which does suffer from a flabby middle part.

Billy Zane relishes as the sadistic yet curiously camp Colonel Graham who sends some of his men on a mission to rob Spanish gold but intends to kill them all afterwards.

Some of these men are black including Jessie (Van Peebles) and they manage to escape but Graham and his gang are behind them. However Jessie has demons from the past and rides to a town to avenge the death of his preacher father which includes the nasty sheriff (Richard Jordan.)

The film is bold, brash, anachronistic as well as a history lesson on the impact of African Americans on the western genre which has been swept under the carpet of history.

Van Peebles is doing too much and loses focus on the narrative of this film hence why the middle sags before picking up again. Some of the acting is broad The script is uneven, its over directed but Van Peebles manages to still fire the film with enough mischief and helped out by his actors such as Blair Underwood, Woody Strode, Paul Bartel, Richard Jordan and Billy Zane.

This movie has some great character actors, Isaac Hayes, Woody Strode, Pam Grier, Paul Bartel, and unfortunately they are mostly wasted. The development of the main characters is too rushed, and the story races on at a breakneck pace. "Posse' borrowed liberally from the "spaghetti westerns" ( revenge flashbacks as in "For a Few Dollars More", gattling gun as in "A Fistful of Dollars", coming of the railroad as in "Once Upon a Time in the West") The movie tries to accomplish too much too quickly, and makes one wish that the deliberate pace of the "spaghetti westerns" had also been "borrowed". I rate it a 5.0, very average, and a missed opportunity. - MERK

An awful film; badly written, badly acted, cliched, hackneyed, dross. The premise is such a good one and a chance to educate about black cowboys but the film is truly dire. It is a curious mix of a bad 1950's Randolph Scott B movie and a bad 1970's spaghetti western. The villains are cardboard, the flashbacks laughable, the dialogue excruciating.

The deliberate anachronisms (such as 'Victorian' rap singers and modern swear words like "motherf****er"), are irritating to the extreme.

A Frankenstein monster that died on the lab table.

"Posse" is a great movie!! It's basically something nobody has tried before: telling the tales of the first great black cowboys. Mario Van Peebles wears both hats as he works as both an actor and director for this film, about a black infantrymen named Jessie Lee leading his fellow troopers into battling white supremacists and his former commanding officer (played with slimy exception by Billy Zane). "Posse" has everything a good western should have: great gun-fights, cool performances (especially by Van Peebles, Stephen Baldwin, and Big Daddy Kane) and a triumphant ending.

The most interesting part was how the movie's horse trainers got horses to fall on their left side so many times. Every time there was a mounted gun battle, boom, another horse took a dive left. Bullets must have been real cheap because these "cowboys" shoot hundreds of rounds and never seem to run out. During one fight, our hero fires his two six shooters 17 times without reloading. Pretty neat trick. And for some reason, he spins his revolvers every time he holsters one. But that's Hollywood. But when 11 bad guys ride into town and 16 get shot, now that's show business. The movie is just bad. I gave it 3 stars just for effort. Update in 11/2020. I tried watching this again. I just got worse. Anyone giving this movie more than a 3 has no concept of reality.

A good old-fashioned flight-and-revenge western, given a twist and a touch of gravitas by injecting a little black social history into its plot. Lead by Mario Van Peebles, who does OK, the gang of misfits on the run from Billy Zane's (seemingly unstoppable) army bigwig all acquit themselves well, their adventures plausible yet fun and exciting. There're some nice moody flashback scenes setting up the hero's character and backstory, a good shoot-out ending as our heroes defend the town from greedy white landgrabbers, and even Stephen Baldwin isn't bad in this enjoyable, quite powerful western.

Not entirely unwatchable, but Posse attempts to be so many things that the lack of focus causes it to be inadequate in all of them.

Piggybacking off the revival of popularity of the Western genre, the movie attempts to act as a social commentary on systemic oppression of minorities by white authorities. It referenced historical racist policies such as the grandfather clause to restrict black voters in the reconstruction era, as well as pointing out that history books and entertainment have largely ignored the contributions, and even the existence to some extent, of African Americans. Near the end we even see a character quote Rodney King in an effort to draw a parallel to contemporary abuses of authority that led to the LA riots which occurred only a year prior to the production of this film.

What could have been an impassioned statement of the contemporary state of affairs is dampened by the lack of focus. These statements are sort inserted into dialogue without any real attempt to be organic in structured. It feels almost as if they made an action movie and then decided to add some substance after the fact.

As far as trying to be an action movie, it feels like the many long and drawn out shootouts are slow and repetitive. The posse spends most of the movie running from their pursuers and rallying somewhere where the pursuers always end up finding them, killing one guy, and then on to the next rallying point to repeat the process.

Furthering the damage to the flow of action in the movie is the director and star's vanity getting in the way. We'll see a shootout followed by a scene set to slow music and Mario Van Peebles being shirtless and showing is biceps on more occasion than is called for. These scenes are interlaced with his unconvincing brooding look into the middle distance while seeing poorly filmed flashbacks of his personal tragedies. These scenes, as shot, interrupt the pace of the movie, making a 100 minute film feel like a week of your life.

Mario's need to be shirtless on a dozen occasions is later coupled with a nearly pornographic sex scene that is so poorly crafted you might expect to have been in Tommy Wiseau's "The Room." It's unnecessary, and clearly an attempt to appeal to the sex drive of a young audience, but is not germane to the plot in any way. Add on the fact that the character literally offers money to this young woman's father to allow him the opportunity to engage in this act. This happens despite the fact that we're supposed to believe in the moral fortitude of this character.

With all the pacing issues, competing plot elements, poor acting (how you have a cast with Tine Loc and Stephen Baldwin but still manage having the lead star be your weakest acting performance is an accomplishment of its own), and under-developed dialogue, we're left with a movie that seems to have been very poorly researched for the time it's set in, a litany of factual errors both in presentation and dialogue, and some distractingly interesting cinematography.

What was an interesting premise, and what could have been a blockbuster classic, was turned into a nearly amateur attempt to get a C+ in a community college film class.

When I heard about and saw the trailers for "Posse" I was eagerly waiting for the film's release. African-Americans made up fully a third of all cowboys in the Old West, but were virtually non-existent in Hollywood's Old West, except as train porters or mammies. The only real black cowboy seen by most Americans was Woody Strode, thanks to John Ford ("Sergeant Rutledge," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "How the West Was Won"), Richard Brooks ("The Professionals") and Italian filmmakers ("Once Upon a Time in the West," "The Revengers," "The Unholy Four").

"Posse," written, produced and directed by Mario Van Peebles, had promise. Unfortunately, it gets bogged down by cliches and a tired storyline. A rousing climax almost saves the film, though.

The movie begins with a stark history lesson about the true accomplishments of blacks in the Old West, as told to Reginald and Warren Hudlin by an old man (the legendary Woody Strode). He then segues into the fictitious story of Jesse Lee...

Lee (Mario Van Peebles) and his men are getting cut to pieces by the Spanish during the Spanish-American War while their commanding officer (a slimy, but effective Billy Zane) drinks Cognac miles away. Lee complains about the conditions and is arrested. Zane later promises to exonerate him and his men if they will pull off a mission for him -- namely to steal valuable documents from the Spanish. Stephen Baldwin is thrown in with Lee's gang because he's a troublemaker Zane wants to get rid of. The group pulls off the mission, but, instead of finding documents, they find gold bullion. They also find Zane and his cohorts waiting at the rendezvous point with guns to finish them off. Unfortunately for Zane, his men are like Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders -- long on bravado, short on skill. Lee's men, having been in combat, get the drop on Zane, kill most of his men and flee back to America as wanted men. (By the way, the method they use to get out of Cuba and back to America is original, but very creepy).

The middle part of the film is spent showing Lee and his men (rapper Tone Loc, Baldwin, a whiny aide and a few spares) heading to New Orleans, where they meet up with Big Daddy Kane. They also run into Zane, who has been tracking them. The whole tracking plotline is hard to believe (remember how long it took John Wayne to track down Natalie Wood in "The Searchers"?), but it makes for good shootouts.

Eventually, Lee and his men make it back to Lee's hometown, a black township full of freedmen. Such townships were numerous in the Old West, but survived only at the whim of white county officials (watch "Rosewood" for an example of what they often suffered from). The town is run by Richard Jordan as a greedy sheriff in cahoots with some crooked county officials. Throw in Zane and his own posse, along with a Gatling gun and you get the rousing climax.

Mario Van Peebles is not much of an actor, but he has enough range and skill to carry the burden of being Jesse Lee. Baldwin is not quite up to par with brothers Alec and Daniel, but he holds his own, especially when he meets his demise at the hands of fellow whites. I liked Big Daddy Kane's soft-spoken, but proud and defiant, role as Father Time and the way he kept looking at his pocket watch before doing anything. Tone Loc was a waste, though, since he kept rapping like it was 1998 instead of 1898.

The town basically had one purpose and that was to show off an impressive cast of black stars -- Melvin Van Peebles, Pam Grier, Reginald Vel Johnson and Nipsey Russell, among others. Of course, having a cameo meant biting the bullet (literally) in the finale.

By the way, another problem for "Posse" was its setting. Many contributions and accomplishments by African-Americans came during the years following the Civil War, from 1865-1890. Black soldiers became the vaunted Buffalo Soldiers who protected white settlers and tracked down Geronimo. Freed blacks moved west in droves as homesteaders and as cowboys on cattle drives because many white men had been killed or maimed during the war. Black townships sprang up in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Black lawmen like the legendary Bass Reeves were in abundance, especially in Oklahoma and Texas. By 1898, blacks were in a decline (despite their bravery in the Spanish-American War) that would not be reversed until World War I. Surely, Van Peebles could have drawn up a storyline set between 1865 and 1890.

"Posse" has a lot going for it. It's too bad Mario Van Peebles went for cliches, shootouts and tired storylines meant to sell tickets rather than tell a good story. "Unforgiven" and "Tombstone" showed you can do both.

The problem with Posse -- in addition to be too talky for a movie that seems to follow so many western tropes -- is that it wants to paint everything with a chintzy gloss that's way over the top. Now, I'm not a fan of the dirty, dusty, bland westerns that have been popular the past 25 years, either. I prefer the John Wayne variety and occasionally something like High Noon. But this movie tries to out-fantasy even those technicolor ones from the 50s and 60s that made the west seem like it wasn't just a bunch of scroungy, flea-bitten cast offs busy shooting each other in the street when not trying to brutalize People of Color.

So, what's good? Well, there's a fair amount of attention to detail, including the late 1800s Army uniforms at the beginning. Much of what we think about the cavalry in the 1860s and 70s really was a reflection of dress from decades later. The acting is reasonably good -- I say this not because anyone is bad but because the ADHD directing and script doesn't call for anything close to nuance or subtlety for scenes. This is one of those movies where you get a headache because all the characters move at a frenetic pace, like a room full of noisy, restless children all competing for attention from the adults.

There's a revenge story here -- we've seen it a million times before. The funny thing is something like The Outlaw Josey Wales does it and a bunch of people go crazy. This movie does it and they act like it is foreign territory. Of course, there may be obvious reasons.

The movie also tries to have a social conscience. The problem is that like everything else, it's over the top, to the degree that the dialogue often sounds more like a lesson than talk. I get that films like these have the double duty of trying to evoke in an audience understanding that some either pitifully lack or others are just far too aware of (to their suffering), but if everyone just trusted the story more, a lot of the dialogue wouldn't be necessary.

Anyway, as far as 1990s westerns go, this is no worse than, say, The Quick and the Dead. They look a lot like each other and were just as over the top. The funny thing, though, is the critics liked that one. Not so much this one. Golly, I wonder what's the difference?

I enjoyed this movie extremely. It was the last great Mario Van Peebles movie I know of. It had a hip-hop old west flavor to it. Big Daddy Kane and Tone Loc had major parts. It shouldn't have won any Oscars, but it was enjoyable all the same.

The best and greatest thing about this film, the only thing, is an opening narrative by the great Woody Strode, who was a unique and ground breaking African American actor, who was also 75 per cent Native American. He sets us up with the premise that there are many great stories of the African Americans who moved west, built towns, became cowboys, and whose stories are never told. From this magical and promising beginning we enter a cartoon, clichéd, pointless parody of parody and what could have been a great and serious tale is just another really bad movie. Casting, one note comic actors like Mario Van Peebles as the lead is the first sign that no one here wanted to make a serious film. He is the type of actor that makes one praise the on and off switch on the video player. As many other commentators have noted, this was such a great idea for a film, yet the actors and the director failed, and failed absolutely.

Mario Van Peebles, a film maker not previously known to me, comes up with the money to make a western that bangs the drum for all the unrecognised black cowboys in the old west but ends up just making another shoot 'em up rip roaring çowboy film we've seen many times before. Maybe his backers wouldn't let him make something more serious in case audiences turned away. He makes something of a point about the suppression of black folk and native Americans but ultimately just ends up with a spaghetti type fantasy. It's great fun with very watchable cinematography and endless action and some fair characterisations. Stephen Baldwin in particular is a hoot. Billy Zane is a cavalry officer intent on tracking down the black posse of the title, led by Van Peebles and Richard Jordan as a corrupt sheriff also has the same mission. I think the idea was to bring some attention to the poor treatment of minority races in America but other films have been much more effective in that message that I have seen like In The Heat Of The Night, Sergeant Rutledge and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner. These are old movies now but there are newer ones like Fences and Hidden Figures that I've seen recently that are thought provoking too. I doubt if Posse hit the mark but it is very entertaining.

Wow, what a racist, profane piece of celluloid garbage, and what an insult to the great genre of Westerns.

Exploitive? Sex scenes abound, profanity abounds, violence and gore abounds.....everything that gives modern movies such a good name, especially among those who prefer classic-era movies. This is the kind of sleaze that gives the old folks ammunition against today's films.

Somehow I just can't picture nude male bathing scenes in Randolph Scott or Gene Autrey films. Nor can I picture hearing "motherf---er!" exclaimed here and there. I sincerely doubt that word was even around over 100 years ago. Yet, the f-word is so prevalent here you'd think you were watching a story centered in today's urban areas, not the old west of the 1800s.

Prejudice? Well, what if all the white characters were good guys and every black person was the nasty, brutal villain? Do you think someone might complain about a racist movie? Home come we don't hear an outcry when the reverse - as demonstrated in this film - is shown in hundreds of theaters across the country?

Mario Van Peeples wrote, directed and starred in this bomb. Remember that name. Apparently, he is the "Ed Wood" of today's filmmakers. Even Spike Lee wouldn't be this racist. You can't get much worse than this movie.

After a brief introduction, this movie begins during the Spanish-American War in which the all-black 10th Cavalry is encountering fierce resistance from the Spanish forces. The leader of the 10th Cavalry, "Jessie Lee" (Mario Van Peebles), along with a handful of men, is then sent on a secret mission behind enemy lines to capture a gold shipment. But when they return they are double-crossed by their maniacal commander, "Colonel Graham" (Billy Zane). A gunfight ensues and they are able to escape and sneak aboard a ship back to the United States. However, Colonel Graham has no intention of allowing Jesse Lee's small group to escape so easily with all of that gold. At any rate, rather than revealing the entire plot I will just say that this film has quite a bit of action and I enjoyed it for the most part. However, I must also add that it relied too heavily on building a mystique around Jesse Lee to the detriment of everything else. That is not to say that other actors weren't allowed sufficient time on screen. If anything I thought Stephen Baldwin (as "Little J Teeters") and Big Daddy Kane ("Father Time") put on excellent performances. I might also add that I thought Salli Richardson-Whitfield (as "Lana") looked absolutely stunning in her role. But some of the scenes involving Mario Van Peebles went a bit overboard and seemed too heavy-handed in my view. In any case, this isn't a bad western film and I rate it as slightly above average.

This is the worst movie of ALL TIME! It's one of those that is so ridiculous and the acting so bad that you turn off the video 1/3 into it so that you can use your time for better purposes like cleaning the toilet. If you actually watch the whole thing, GOD help you.

Ok, maybe Posse can't compare to other popular cowboy/western movies. But that's because it didn't have the FUNDING those movies had. Obviously, whenever you want to produce a story such as this one, focusing on African American historical involvement (and NO, servants and 'mammies' are not historical involvement), Hollywood isn't going to be too supportive. And believe me they weren't. The producers and actors sacrificed a lot of 'out of pocket' expenses to make "Posse", just so that the story could be told. I think that alone is commendable. Posse may not be Oscar material (and they don't like Black media too much either), but it is a start. It is entertaining, and it introduces us to the black cowboy, a character most of us are unfamiliar with.

I rarely give a 1 star rating because I try real hard not to. I look for any reason I can to give higher than a 1 rating because this is someone's work. Someone or someones took the time to put this movie together. Sure, it may not be the best movie but they took the time to make it so that has to account for something.

Not today.

Posse was bad on multiple levels: the story, the script, the acting, the camerawork. I can't believe it's considered a western. Western is one of my favorite genres and this does not belong amongst westerns. This movie was to westerns what Donald Trump is to diplomacy.

I suffered through this movie until a certain scene. This scene had me laughing out loud which was somewhat miraculous considering how royally upset I was with the film til this point.

It was a showdown in the town of Freemanville and a corrupt unit of the army had brought in a Gatling gun. Jesse Lee (Mario Van Peebles), the hero, has a genius plan to disable the gun. He's going to use dynamite. Not a bad idea Jesse. How are you going to get close enough with the dynamite to light it and toss it near the Gatling gun without getting shot up? Strap it to an arrow?

No. He lights the dynamite wick, puts the lit dynamite stick in his mouth (yes his mouth), shoots a man, mounts a horse using the dead man as a human shield, then gallops towards the men reloading the Gatling gun, shoots the two stooges at the Gatling gun, and as his horse leaps in the air he tosses the dynamite on the platform with the gun just in time for the dynamite to blow.

ROFL. Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me right now? You've got to be kidding me.

At that point I decided that I could no longer fight the one rating. Mario Van Peebles was dead set on getting a one star rating from me no matter how hard I tried to grade on a curve. So I will oblige.