MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘Posse’: A New Take on the Old West

Some movies sneak up on you. Some bowl you over. “Posse” (citywide) is definitely in the second category: a big, rousing, hip-hopping, trash-talking, dynamite-lobbing, all-stops-out, rock-the-house comic/epic Western that comes at you with both guns blazing and barely lets up for a second.

As directed by lead actor Mario Van Peebles--who showed he had style to burn in the flashy but erratic crime thriller “New Jack City”--this tale of a racially integrated Wild Bunch battling the corrupt Cavalry and land-grabbing Ku Klux Klansmen is defiantly flamboyant. But its excesses are amusing, riveting. Even as the filmmakers and actors go roaring over the top, they keep winking. In scene after scene, you may detect an under-voice chuckling: “You think I can’t top the last bit? Think I can’t do a Sergio Leone? A George Roy Hill? A Clint Eastwood? Watch this. “

In barely less than two hours, Van Peebles, cinematographer Peter Menzies and writers Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane run through virtually every Western structural motif and archetype they can think of: from Hunt-the-Man-Down to Cleaning-Up-the-Town, from holster-slapping six-gun duels to a climactic Gatling Gun holocaust that suggests “The Magnificent Seven” scrambled up with “The Wild Bunch” and “High Noon.”

The basic format is pursuit and vendetta. Hero Jesse Lee (Van Peebles), a Cuban-American War Buffalo Soldier with a prison record and a cache of gold, lights out for the territory ahead with evil, sexy Col. Graham (Billy Zane) at his heels, and the “Posse”--Tiny Lister Jr., Tone Loc, Charles Lane, Big Daddy Kane and white brother Stephen Baldwin (the Larry Bird of the group)--at his side. When they reach the African-American township of Freemanville, Jesse finds it besieged by a crooked white sheriff (Richard Jordan) and his silent partner, the bad black marshal (Blair Underwood), who want to sell it to the railroad.

The movie doesn’t always make sense. In the beginning, we see an old photo of the entire six-man Posse together, despite the fact that Tone Loc’s Angel was killed just as Big Daddy Kane’s Father Time joined up. And sometimes it seems less an epic than an all-star romp. Pam Grier, Isaac Hayes, Robert Hooks, Paul Bartel and Nipsey Russell all check in, producer Stephen Cannell appears briefly as Jimmy Love, and Mario’s father, Melvin Van Peebles, is on hand as wise old Papa Joe, the sagebrush patriarch.

There are barroom brawls and desert treks, jailbreaks, stolen deeds and bordello blowouts and Jesse Lee winds up wearing an Eastwood poncho, a fierce squint and a “Man With No Name” black hat. There’s even a schoolmarm (Salli Richardson)--though, since this is the ‘90s, she has R-rated scenes in a candle-lit boudoir.

Some people may complain that “Posse” is all over the map, but that’s what it’s obviously trying to do: chew up the map and spit it out . . . with a smile. There’s more than a flicker of reality under the joke: the fact that the black frontierspeople of history have been slighted or ignored in most Hollywood Westerns. Beginning with a framework that suggests “Little Big Man”--narrator Woody Strode telling us about the hidden history, the Wild West we don’t know--it tries to right the balance in one huge comic blast.

An impossible task, probably. “Posse” is one of those movies so rich, packed and energetic that they can’t get everything they aim for. The two main sub-genres used here--”Outlaw Buddies” and “The Stranger in Town”--don’t really mix. How can you light out for the territory ahead when you’re really going home? When Jesse Lee hits Freemanville and switches from head of the Posse to lone gun with a wounded past, and a hot schoolmarm, we may resent the fact that some of the mock-Western camaraderie is being dropped. But “Posse” is descended more from the baroque Westerns anyway: the Leone or Peckinpah movies, the off-center stylistic explosions like “40 Guns” or “Johnny Guitar.” It’s also a post-MTV movie, scored with Michel Colombier, blues and rap, and it tries to keep us in sensory overload--something never more obvious than in the end titles sequence, where Van Peebles gives us snatches of ‘30s Herb Jeffries Westerns and a shot of Woody Strode in “Once Upon a Time in the West.” (Why not Ford’s ultimate Buffalo Soldier movie “Sergeant Rutledge”?)

When all your guns are blazing, you’re going to hit more than a few targets, unless you’re turned in completely the wrong direction. “Posse” (MPAA-rated R, for violence, sexuality and language) isn’t. Violent and over-sexy as this movie may be, offensive as some may find it, it never loses its grinning good humor, its revisionist drive, its shoot-the-works spirit. It’s a killer entertainment--with an accent on “kill.”

‘Posse’ Mario Van Peebles: Jesse Lee Stephen Baldwin: Little J Charles Lane: Weezie Big Daddy Kane: Father Time

A Gramercy Pictures/PolyGram Filmed Entertainment presentation of a Working Title Films production. Director Mario Van Peebles. Producers Preston Holmes, Jim Steele. Executive producers Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Paul Webster, Bill Fishman. Screenplay Sy Richardson, Dario Scardapane. Cinematographer Peter Menzies. Editor Mark Conte. Costumes Paul Simmons. Music Michel Colombier. Music supervisor Karyn Rachtman. Production design Catherine Hardwicke. Art director Kim Hix. Set decorator Tess Posnansky. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (for strong violence and language, and sexuality).