Movie Review: Citizen Vigilante

Germany banned it. Elon Musk posted it to his 200 million followers. Armie Hammer stars in it. Uwe Boll directed it. That combination of facts tells you more about Citizen Vigilante than anything that actually happens on screen.

First, the controversy, because that is the reason anyone is watching this.

Boll’s film was released in select US theaters and digitally on June 19. Germany’s FSK ratings board refused to certify it, effectively blocking distribution in the country. Boll told the Daily Telegraph: “I hired a lawyer to complain about it, but we lost in a six-two vote as I was told that the film was inciting violence against migrants.” His response was to release the entire film for free on X from June 25-27, where Elon Musk reposted it to his full following. That distribution strategy to bypass the gatekeepers entirely, go directly to the audience that wants to see it is more interesting than anything in the film itself.

The film was inspired by a 2016 Hamburg case in which a group of teenagers gang-raped a 14-year-old girl, left her for dead, and received suspended sentences. Boll’s framing of that case is blunt: “If you look at what happened in Hamburg, where the rapists walked free without any penalty, the coverage in the media was like ‘Oh, the poor perpetrators.’ It’s as if we’re living in a completely insane and absurd political environment, especially in Europe, where people have completely lost track. There is a huge difference between so-called ‘hate speech’ and stabbing people in the neck. But facts don’t matter anymore.” He also said: “It’s absurd how I feel politically. Now you’re being told that if you’re a conservative about anything — social, sexual, political — that you’re a Nazi.”

Those are fair observations about the state of European political discourse. The film itself fails to do them justice.

Armie Hammer plays Sanders, a wealthy American expat whose wife is murdered by a migrant criminal in the opening minutes. He becomes a vigilante, gains a social media following of supporters who wish someone like him operated in their own countries, while Interpol Regional Chief Henry, played by Costas Mandylor, closes in on him. It is Death Wish for the 21st century, positioned as the right-wing version of John Wick. The positioning is the most exciting thing about it.

The problem is the execution. The film barely has a narrative. Instead of following Sanders through a propulsive story, large portions are given to news broadcasts, time jumps, and structural cleverness that seems designed to paper over budget limitations. The result is a film where you keep waiting for something to happen, and when it finally does, the gratuitous violence lands somewhere between disturbing and unintentionally comic — blood splattering in quantities that owe more to Sam Raimi than to any credible thriller. The tension never builds because the film keeps cutting away from its own protagonist to follow reactions to him rather than his actual experience. You never get inside Sanders enough to understand him, care about him, or follow his psychology in any meaningful way.

There is a sequence in a brothel that someone on Twitter helpfully explained is meant to be thematically resonant. Sanders stares at mold on the wall while engaged with a prostitute, symbolizing his fixation on the rot in society consuming him even during moments of attempted pleasure. That the explanation had to come from Twitter rather than from the film tells you something. The scene plays as gratuitous. The metaphor only exists if you bring it with you.

There is a better scene in a nightclub where Sanders notices two men attempting to drug women’s drinks and switches the glasses. It works because it is clean, specific action in service of a clear moral point. When the film stays this direct it has something. Those moments are too infrequent.

The slaughter of the immigrant family, including women, in their home is where the film’s tonal uncertainty reaches its peak. Boll has said he is serious, not satirical. But watching Sanders massacre an entire household because of a son’s involvement in a rape gang lands without the moral clarity the story needs. The film wants you to understand Sanders as a man pushed beyond what he can bear by a system that has failed everyone. The execution makes him look like someone conducting a purge. Those are different things, and the film never resolves the difference. Is it a portrait of a man breaking down under genuine grievance, or a power fantasy? Boll says one thing. The screen suggests another.

The technical elements are competent in places. Location scouting across what is meant to be a generic European city creates a convincing atmosphere, and the cinematography is better than you expect from a Uwe Boll film.

Then again, Uwe Boll is a director whose filmography includes Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, House of the Dead, Postal, and In the Name of the King, adaptations of video game properties so catastrophically received that they became their own genre of notorious badness. He remains one of the few directors to have challenged his critics to boxing matches and won. He has never stopped making films. He has made money regardless of what anyone thinks of the quality because the German tax code for many years made his productions profitable before a single ticket was sold, a loophole eventually closed by the German government. The man is genuinely unconventional in ways the film industry has never known what to do with.

Citizen Vigilante is his most talked-about film in decades. The ban made it famous. Musk posting it made it infamous. The film itself is too choppy, too narratively thin, and too blunt in its worst moments to be the serious statement Boll claims it is. The editing is rough, the music choices are bad, and the actors have limited material to work with despite the casting being serviceable.

What the film does correctly is acknowledge that things are broken in European immigration enforcement, that judicial leniency toward violent criminals causes real harm, and that the people harmed by that leniency have nowhere to go. Those are true things. They deserved a better film.

We are pro-free speech. Germany’s ratings board refusing to certify this film is censorship dressed up as youth protection. Elon Musk posting it to 200 million followers is exactly how you handle that kind of censorship. The film should be available, seen, and judged on its merits.

4/10. Watch it because it is banned. Do not expect John Wick.

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