Posse

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.” Read full review

Posse is an exciting, action-packed Western, and almost all of its social commentary is skillfully embedded in the gripping drama itself. [14 May 1993, p.3G]

In both senses of the word, Posse is a colorful outing that fills a real gap, a film you can respect as well as enjoy. [14 May 1993, p.45]

Posse wants to be a 'classic Western' but its definition of classic is consistently cliched. Yet it has such grace and such an abiding belief in its message that you can't help but smile approval. [14 May 1993]

Mr. Van Peebles and his screenwriters, Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane, care most about making their points emphatically, even if that sometimes leaves Posse riding heavy in the saddle. Luckily, most of their film is fast-paced and star-studded enough to avoid an overly preachy tone. Read full review

Van Peebles tells the story with ferocious vigor and unsparing brutality, entering Jesse’s haunted memory and dramatizing the farsighted schemes and improvisational daring on which the men's survival depends. Read full review

With the exploitative brashness and twice the volume of his New Jack City, Van Peebles mixes rap with rawhide for a deliriously exaggerated entertainment. Read full review

As in New Jack City, Van Peebles displays a distinctive visual style of tilted angles and frequent camera movement, and the script by Sy Richardson and Dario Scardapane also keeps things moving, but perhaps the best sequence of all is the opening one, which features the great Woody Strode. Read full review

Despite its numerous problems, Posse remains an entertaining film. Not only does it bring an innovative perspective to the western, it tells a solid story. Read full review

As Van Peebles turns the western into an equal-opportunity genre, his voice occasionally fades in the din. But be assured: It’s a voice spoiling to be heard. Read full review

Westerns, even offbeat ones, demand a lean clarity that Van Peebles, at this point, lacks the discipline to establish. Read full review

While Van Peebles' ambitions are epic-size, his results, sad to say, are less so. This is one messy Western omelet - highly edible but overscrambled. [14 May 1993, p.3D]

In its own way, sloppy and excessive with LSD camera work and cutting, Posse is like a Gene Autrey Western from the Forties where the bad guys are the bad guys and the good guys are the good guys and the girl and the boy love each other (and those films were frequently more elliptically hallucinatory than this). Read full review

This is an overdirected, overphotographed, overdone movie that is so distracted by its hectic, relentless style that the story line is rendered almost incoherent. Read full review

POSSE remains no more than a pleasant genre diversion with unrealized ambitions. Read full review

Despite all its agreeable revisionism and breezy bonhomie, Posse has the feel of a mish-mash of elements all thrown into a big pot and stirred. Lacking dramatic grounding and structuring, even the pertinent revelations that will be most surprising and interesting to modern audiences carry more intellectual than emotional resonance. Read full review

A very good movie could probably be made about the black experience in the Old West, but Mario Van Peebles' Posse is not it.[14 May 1993]

Posse is a great idea for a movie, but rarely has such a solid idea been exploited with greater indifference or lack of imagination. Read full review

The jarring 1990s sensibility of this over-directed, under-written movie extends to style as well as content. Worst of all is the blatantly fetishistic attitude the director adopts towards his posturing macho star. Read full review

Despite claims to the contrary, Van Peebles has no apparent desire to accurately reflect history. Instead, he caters, with an ugly lack of integrity, to a twisted perception of "popular taste," spinning an ego-trip that steals a numbing variety of Western cliches while betraying them with contemporary flavoring. [14 May 1993, p.20]