FASTEN SEAT BELT FOR 'POSSE' ACTION.(PREVIEW)

Byline: GENE SEYMOUR Newsday

From now on, seat belts should probably be standard equipment in every theater in which a Mario Van Peebles film is playing.

Consider the opening of "Posse," the Van Peebles-directed Western. After a brisk, semi-leisurely credit sequence featuring veteran black movie cowboy Woody Strode, the movie sends us to Cuba, circa 1898, in the thick of the Spanish-American War.

And use of the word "thick" here isn't casual. We are tossed right into the bloody maw of battle. Smoke. Screams. Bodies falling down in front of us.

This was how "New Jack City," Van Peebles' 1991 mega-hit gangster thriller, drew in its audience. The credits drifted lazily over aerial tracking shots of the Manhattan skyline on one of those rare sunlit days when the haze has been vacuumed away. The camera seems to have wandered haphazardly to the Queensboro Bridge.

Then -- …