Outlaw Posse, the new Western from Mario Van Peebles, is so ineptly mounted it’s shocking. A vanity project to its core, it’s a revisionist film that unfolds like a violent after-school special rather than any sincere attempt to reckon with America’s frontier expansion. Van Peebles can be a competent director and has made many films, including one legitimate classic, and here has called in several favors from his friends in Hollywood, all of whom debase themselves by appearing in the supporting cast. Why would they indulge his vanity? What producers would let Peebles get away with this condescending and ostentatious work? These are just some of the questions that arise, and to think about them is no distraction from the cavalcade of poorly conceived moments that make up this film.
Van Peebles stars as Chief, an outlaw cowboy with a heart of gold. He is the sort of man who dispenses justice freely rather than wait for the law to intervene. The sort of man who lets a beautiful young woman (Amber Reign Smith) sleep nude next to him, although they never consummate their relationship. Chief is the sort of man who is an absent father to his son (Mandela Van Peebles), a straight-arrow farmer, but supports him from the shadows every step of the way. In each character detail, Van Peebles signals his discomfort with the antihero status that is common to the revisionist Western. It is the funhouse mirror version of Unforgiven, a film in which Clint Eastwood plays someone beyond redemption. Van Peebles does not have the inclination or courage for such an approach.
The plot involves Chief recruiting his cowboy friends, including John Carroll Lynch, to steal gold from an abandoned mine that belonged to the Confederacy. On his tail is Angel (William Mapother), the leader of another outlaw gang, whom we know is a bad guy because he tells us, repeatedly, rather than let his conduct speak for him. On Chief’s journey, there are vignettes where he meets characters played by Whoopi Goldberg, Edward James Olmos and Cedric the Entertainer. Each of these scenes is a distraction, derailing the urgency of the narrative, and an excuse for the actors to explore eccentric characterizations or for the writers to show how minorities established lives for themselves during frontier days. Van Peebles also wrote the screenplay for Outlaw Posse, and his awkward jokes cannot disguise that all these actors seem confused by their appearances here. The only one who barely understands his character is Olmos, who proves that he can bring credibility to literally any material.
Throughout Outlaw Posse, there is barely any indication that we are seeing the work of the same man who made New Jack City and Baadasssss!. The cinematography drenches all the scenes in too much light, which creates an uncanny feeling that everything we see is too fake or cheesy to suspend our disbelief. Peebles clearly has a fondness for rays of sunshine, repeatedly capturing beams shining through a windowpane or a cave crevasse. Sometimes light oversaturates the images until it is borderline incoherent, and yet that is not the film’s worst formal quality. Simply put, Van Peebles is an incompetent director of action. There is no sense of movement or suspense in his gunfights, just a series of “hero shots” capturing the actors striking a pose. Peebles does have a fondness for violence, however, and yet there is a strange incongruity between this film’s bloodlust and its didactic approach to revisionism. Here is actual dialogue from Outlaw Posse, an exchange between Chief and Angel that occurs in the middle of a gunfight:
“You’re the thief, Angel! That gold was reparations money to pay back them enslaved families for building this country!”
“Reparations??!?! [Black people] were brought here to work the land, not own it! This country was made for wealthy white landowners … like me!”
Dialogue like this attempts to shoehorn modern sensibilities into outdated ways of thinking. This is the goal of many revisionist Westerns – The Wild Bunch and Unforgiven come immediately to mind – but most filmmakers have the wherewithal to use action, character and plot to illustrate those ideas. Van Peebles does not think too highly of his audience, since he would rather underline inequities that any genre fan has known about for decades. If this film is meant to be an answer to Westerns like Django Unchained or The Harder They Fall, then Van Peebles is exactly the wrong man to mount such a critique. Self-satisfied to a fault, this is the sort of film that runs into the Ed Wood problem because, somehow, Mario Van Peebles has never seen a glimpse of his own work that he did not automatically love.
Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution
The post Outlaw Posse appeared first on Spectrum Culture.