Remedial history lesson on the Afro-American West ("People forget," says the authoritative Woody Strode in a present-day preamble, "that one out of every three cowboys was black"). But the story proper -- tracing the path of a "posse of outlaws," one white man and the rest black, from the front lines of the Spanish-American War to a utopian separatist frontier town called Freemanville -- proves to be not much devoted to historical truth. To the contrary, what is interesting here (or almost interesting, or fleetingly interesting) is how easily this piece of "revisionism" appropriates and assimilates the hoariest conventions of the Western genre: the railroad representing progress; the pacifistic schoolmarm representing civilization; the revenge quest representing men having to do what men have to do. Mario Van Peebles, who also directed, undeniably cuts a stylish figure (leather laces around the edge of his hatbrim, ankle-length duster, holsters angled every which way: very Italianate), especially when in the classic posture of "fanning" his six-gun. The problem with him emerges more behind the camera, where he pushes stylishness right to the water's-edge of narcissism. He always gives you a lot to look at, thumbing through the unabridged manual of cinematographer's tricks. Once the initial excitement wears off, however, the impression is of a music-video phantasmagoria rather than of anything rooted in the real world. And this lends an air of insubstantiality that goes ill with the revisionist purpose of setting the record straight. Stephen Baldwin, Charles Lane, Billy Zane. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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