Summary
As incompetently made as any other Uwe Boll movie, Citizen Vigilante also has the unique distinction of being a smokescreen for genuinely abhorrent views and a legitimately dangerous call to arms.
Uwe Boll is a filmmaker best-known for producing at least three movies – though arguably many more – that are among the very worst ever made. After cutting his teeth on woeful video game adaptations funded through some kind of German tax shelter scheme, he retired in 2016 to become a restaurateur, and when that didn’t pan out, he returned to filmmaking in 2022. With the financial loopholes having closed, getting movies made in the 2020s – much less making movies that turn a profit – is a different proposition, and Boll’s solution, at least in Citizen Vigilante, is to prey on worsening racial tensions in Europe and abroad and deliver an exploitation flick as badly made as all his others but given propagandist appeal by the obviousness of his inflammatory rhetoric.
There are several ironies bundled up in this. The first is that the film’s original title, which was nixed due to legal grounds, was The Dark Knight, drawing awkward attention to the fact that the popularity of Batman – and countless other associated comic-book vigilantes, such as The Punisher – has made any conversations about the complex morality of vigilantism difficult to have. The second is that this is intended as a comeback vehicle for Armie Hammer, who has been rendered pretty much unhireable in the U.S. on the back of several sexual misconduct allegations.
Hammer trying to get back into the public’s good graces by playing Sanders, an American living abroad in some unnamed European country who decides that the only way to save the West is to extrajudicially murder criminal migrants that have been allowed to take over on the back of a failed justice system, would be hilarious if it wasn’t so dangerous. This is unabashed wish-fulfilment grindhouse fantasy in its purest form, but the wish being fulfilled is that of a race war, which in the contemporary political climate is not an altogether unlikely possibility. And that’s not funny at all.
Citizen Vigilante is exactly the kind of movie – utterly incurious and incomprehensible, but politically barbed – for people who believe that immigrants are to blame for all the violent crimes in the West to see as a rubric for defending their homeland. The setting being “EUROPE”, and not any specific city or even country, is deliberate; the point, according to Boll, is that the events depicted here could feasibly happen anywhere, and that Sanders’ way of dealing with them is the only viable one.
There’s no ambiguity about this. Sanders is beloved by influencers and the general public who see his violent actions as a necessary corrective to systemic corruption and negligence. His opposite number, Interpol chief Henry (Costas Mandylor), is framed as the villain. Sanders’ actions are explicitly presented as being more cathartic measures of justice than the existing legal framework can provide, and his screeds on downstream contamination by unvetted immigration and harmful ideologies like Islam are left unchallenged. Hammer is content to be a mouthpiece for someone else’s hateful politics, just so long as someone cuts him a check for it.
Sanders funds his vigilante activities through rent extracted from tenants in a bunch of properties he inherited from his father, a detail presented entirely without irony. He’s an American who embodies the broadest blowhard xenophobic stereotypes in a country other than his own, but this, again, is not a commentary on anything, let alone itself. This lack of self-awareness, and the flagrant intention of being a delivery mechanism for prejudicial screeds as a call to arms in this incendiary sociopolitical context, is what makes Citizen Vigilante so much worse than even other morally contentious vigilante movies.
The fact that this movie ends with a dedication to “rape victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system” makes its function as a call to arms all too clear. It’s a vitriolic and prejudiced public service announcement disguised as an exploitation movie, clearly intended to inflame racial tensions and champion moral repugnancy as a way to court attention and revenue from the worst kind of grifters and their most sycophantic, brain-dead loyalists. Any of the victims it purports to honour, many of whom have had their requests for their personal tragedies not to be weaponised for political gain fall on deaf ears, are being done a gross disservice by its existence.
Read More: Why Citizen Vigilante Was Banned
