As obviously dreadful a film as Citizen Vigilante is, its cult success has become impossible to ignore (and has perhaps even spawned a sequel already). While it’s made by Uwe Boll and is objectively incompetent in all the ways that matter, it nonetheless captures the political zeitgeist of a culture increasingly worried about lax migration policies, institutional and judiciary failures, and the perceived “replacement” – a long-time far-right white supremacist conspiracy theory alleging global elites are deliberately erasing white populations through forced assimilation of non-white immigrants – of native peoples in Europe and elsewhere. And the greatest evidence for the film’s searing relevance is, apparently, to be found in its ending, during which its “hero” murders a family of Muslim immigrants who were responsible for a gang rape and wrongly acquitted.
I’ve already made it clear that I think this whole thing’s a grift. But a lot of people don’t, and in the interest of defending my own position – not that anyone will listen – and giving the movie, as abhorrent as it is, a fair analytical shake, it’s worth breaking down some of the finer points of why it doesn’t really make the point everyone’s claiming it does.
Holding Out for A Hero
Sanders is a rich American immigrant who moonlights as a brutal vigilante, having amassed a fair amount of public adoration for doing what the justice system cannot or will not and meting out a deserved fate on perpetrators of heinous crimes. Ostensibly, Citizen Vigilante was inspired by a real-life 2016 case in Hamburg in which a 14-year-old girl was gang-raped by migrants who ended up escaping jail time on suspended sentences, so this is the only respect in which the movie can make a claim for being fact-based.
Sanders seems a bit of a contradiction, though. When he offers to acquire justice for a woman hospitalised on the back of a brutal rape, his fervour for the perpetrators – which attracts the attention of Interpol Regional Chief Henry, who’s trying to hunt him down – isn’t quite the same as the ire he has for the Muslim perpetrators of the gang rape that is designed to evoke the Hamburg one. He also mows down an entire SWAT team who come looking for him, who are presumably decent people doing their jobs, without a second thought.
We’ll return to some of these contradictions, but for now, it’s important to note that Sanders can only exist as a conception because there is a perceived need for someone to do what the systems intended to protect us increasingly seem unable or unwilling to do.
Collective Blame
When Sanders takes on the gang-rape case, he initially goes after the corrupt judge who ruled on the case, before eventually setting his sights on Yusuf, one of the perpetrators, and Yusuf’s entire family and social circle. He uses Yusuf to lure everyone to the same apartment and then slaughters them all.
This is where things get a little bit more risqué. There is internal consistency to why Sanders would kill the perpetrators of the attack; it’s violence begetting violence, an eye being taken for an eye. However, the murders of Yusuf’s parents and sister are purely ideological, accompanied by a lengthy screed about Islam. His argument is that Yusuf became a rapist because his religion taught him to, and therefore belief in Islam is, in and of itself, punishable by death.
The daughter’s death sentence is even more flimsy. On social media, she had grimly slut-shamed the victim for how she was dressed, which, in Sanders’ world, is punishable by death. It’s odd to see people so flagrantly supportive of this, given how, certainly in the U.K., custodial sentences handed out for online posts celebrating rioting and the burning of hotels housing asylum seekers were loudly decried as evidence of police state fascism. How the worm turns.
Sanders Has No Moral Code
Murdering people who didn’t commit a crime undermines Sanders’s worldview and moral code. His butchering of the SWAT team, his picking on random kids on buses, and his causing a needless fatality in a road accident don’t have anything to do with his professed objectives. That’s just him being a psycho.
Sanders doesn’t care about misogyny – he owns a brothel as part of an inherited property network – and doesn’t consider the parents of rapists to be worthy of punishment in any scenario other than if the perpetrators are Muslim (how the non-Muslim rapists became rapists is, presumably, a mystery he isn’t interested in solving).
When Sanders visits victims on whose behalf he will set out to achieve revenge, he basically talks them into agreeing to him handling things his own, murderous way by reiterating that the system won’t. He’s constantly banging on about the system, but he benefits from it by proxy as a landlord and a brothel owner in a country in which he’s an immigrant. His own immigrant status is of no concern to anyone, despite the crux of his argument being the inability of immigrants to assimilate. His crusade purports to be against injustice, but it’s pretty unambiguously against Islam almost entirely.
An Explicit Call to Arms
Throughout the movie, thanks to its nonsensically disjointed structure, Sanders often directly addresses the audience and delivers reminders that he’s only doing this until the native populations rise up and do it for themselves. It’s an explicit call to arms and, based on the text of the movie elsewhere, is openly advocating for violence against Muslims on the basis that they’re all equally prone to heinous crimes.
The fact that Sanders is constantly ahead of the authorities frames him as the hero, despite his flagrant psychopathy. He’s also openly supported by almost everyone, at least on social media, creating a cult-like following. His wealth and military training position him as enviable, above the tawdry limitations that bind the rest of us. The framing is obvious. We’re supposed to believe that this guy is the hero and that his demented quest is righteous.
This is a movie designed to incite violence to line a talentless con man director’s pockets. And it’s performing precisely as advertised.
