Before diving into any of the specific details of Citizen Vigilante, let’s get straight into what the film actually is: racist, xenophobic, ethnocentrist, alt-right agitprop manufactured to piss off the “woke Left,” which is exact language used at one point in the narrative. Bravo, Uwe Boll. Anders Breivik would be proud.
Armie Hammer, fresh off Controversy Row (is he even allowed to leave?), portrays a stoic vigilante in a nondescript Eastern European setting. He hunts down people of color and migrant evildoers in the name of a “justice” that victims of rape and assault were denied by the legal system. If you’re skeptical that this reflects the film’s actual narrative framework, don’t worry: Citizen Vigilante — replete with nauseating camerawork, erratic editing, and atrocious dialogue — hammers into our skulls almost immediately that “migrant attacks are on the rise,” so says a news anchor. You also aren’t supposed to doubt that the mysterious European vigilante taking on “these criminals” is a godsend, that “we need someone like him over here in America,” at least according to a man on a TikTok-adjacent reel. And this sentiment does not waver, so strap in.
The majority of Boll’s latest film is in fact constructed like a talking-head documentary interspersed with current events coverage. Hammer, for some reason, periodically interrupts the action to dump exposition onto us, to expound on his background and motivations (slim and inane as they are), and to defend his unlawful acts of violence in the face of police interrogation. We’re seemingly supposed to empathize with his character, who looks like a sociopathic killer cosplaying as a finance bro, and who executes an entire Muslim family in the film’s conclusion. More on that in a moment.
It’s painful to admit, but the white-supremacist polemics — in the form of mock newsreel, talking-head interviews, and even the faux-philosophical anonymous epitaphs in the film’s opening credits — are the most fascinating thing to discuss in regard to Citizen Vigilante. These sequences are where the film is at its most vicious, despicable, and inexcusable. The cold open is no exception: we follow a mother and her child (Hammer’s character as a young boy) grocery shopping, for what feels like an eternity. They finally check out, and while walking outside the mother randomly gets approached by a Black man who stabs her in the neck. Cut to the sensationalist, fearmongering coverage about African migrants, rape and assault, spikes in violent crime. You name it.
The rest of what fills out this film’s runtime can be categorized as “made-for-Redbox” and is barely worth dissecting, except that… Hammer is a landlord who quotes Nietzsche? He’s attacking foreigners in the name of justice when he himself is a foreigner? When he’s not killing immigrants, he’s taking out his anger via rough sex in a brothel? Which happens to be located in a building he owns, and he gets distracted during sex by the mold on the walls? And we linger on this for quite a while? For good measure, the cinematography is constructed from a mix of drone-porn and the sickening yellow shade of wallpaper from Backrooms, while the gunplay scenes are filmed like an episode of Campus PD — if the public safety officers drove armored vehicles and were fully militarized.
In revisiting 1974’s Death Wish — this film’s spiritual predecessor — in light of the first Trump presidency, Greg Cwik noted that the polarizing cult classic “posits… unfettered fascist violence is the only thing that will Make America Great Again.” Boll, still making reprehensible films well into the second Trump administration, ramps this ideology up seventeen notches in its conclusion, allowing Hammer’s titular vigilante to execute an entire Muslim family in their living room — father, mother, son, and daughter — all under the pretense that their son was acquitted in a gang-rape case. Boll frames this act righteously through his choice of valiant public-domain music, not to mention Hammer’s dialogue that essentially justifies his murdering the family since they all practice values from the Quran regarding women’s dress expectations and therefore must have condoned their son’s alleged criminal act. After all, as Hammer exclaims, practically foaming with anger, “If you think that women in America and Europe deserve to be raped because of a dress code, why did you come here?” Not sure, Armie. You didn’t let the family get a word in before you went trigger-happy on them.
In Citizen Vigilante’s final frames, in this bombastic, fetishized celebration of hate crimes, Boll leverages his immortal trollishness to meet the political moment where it is. He resurrects the cinematic legacy of the “wealthy white man who guns down poor minorities, and who goes unpunished by the police” (Cwik). And what better time to do so than right now, when the far Right is poised to glorify and weaponize this sort of message at every turn. More likely, however, this writer just spent an inordinate amount of time thinking critically about a monumentally repugnant piece of trash. Perhaps the joke’s on him.
DIRECTOR: Uwe Boll; CAST: Armie Hammer, Costas Mandylor, Neb Chupin, Vjekoslav Katusin; DISTRIBUTOR: Quiver Distributor; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: June 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
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