I’d never seen an Uwe Boll film before Citizen Vigilante. When people said his movies were unwatchable garbage in the 2000s, I listened. I never bothered with BloodRayne or any of the more controversial video game adaptations, and I assumed he’d go away. But he’s remained active into the mid-2020s, and with Citizen Vigilante, Boll reenters the conversation redeemed, no longer a provocative hack but an eccentric whose slapdash productions recall Jess Franco and whose politics offer welcome counter-programming to recent work by Radu Jude and Boots Riley. Nothing Boll fictionalizes in Citizen Vigilante is exaggerated or uncommon; although the film’s set in Germany, the opening stabbing of a mother in front of her young son echoes Iryna’s Zarutska’s murder last fall, a story that the overwhelmingly liberal press in America largely ignored, along with the murder of Austin Metcalf.
Thank God our problems aren’t as bad as Europe’s, particularly Germany. Imagine going to jail for leaving a negative Yelp review. I’m not kidding. It’s not just politically partisan tweets, it’s negative coffee shop reviews reframed as “hate speech.” You can’t make this shit up. If the solutions proposed in Citizen Vigilante seem absurd, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on all over the world. 1974’s Death Wish was a massive and enduring hit for reasons besides Charles Bronson. Like Armie Hammer says at the end, the people can only take so much.
Hammer is sorely missed in America, an unfortunate #MeToo scapegoat who’s been vindicated, albeit long after anybody cared. I’m not sure I’ve seen him in anything for the better part of a decade, and I wish he had the charmed career of his Call Me By Your Name co-star. If this isn’t a comeback, at least it’s better than folding towels in the Caribbean. Hammer plays Sanders, an American vigilante in Germany who hunts down thieves, rapists, and murderers, all migrants, and kills them himself. Sometimes he just cripples them, but he kills some innocent people, too. The film’s an enjoyable revengematic, full-battle rattle for anyone who likes that kind of thing.
It really gets interesting when Sanders goes to the home of one of many teenage gang rapists. The boy’s father answers the door—everyone’s home. He gets out his gun anyway, tells them to sit down, but not before shooting the boy in the leg. When Sanders interrogates the family and why they allowed this to happen, they protest, “He’s young. He don’t know nothing.” Sanders continues to lecture the teenager he’s just shot in the leg (“I didn’t hit an artery so he should be fine”). The kid pulls the “mental health” card while his dad defends his family’s stone-age views (the sister says the girl deserved it because she dressed in a way that “made the boys horny”) with the Koran and “Don’t you know there’s a war in my country?” Sanders gets the kid to call his friends and fellow rapists, and when they all come over, he kills them immediately, and then slaughters the family. Co-conspirators keep showing up, and he keeps shooting them. It’s something else.
Unlike Disclosure Day, which would’ve been universally accepted in 2002, the premise and the politics of Citizen Vigilante would’ve seemed alarmist and offensive only a decade ago. Now? It’s almost tame. You can find thousands of stories in European publications involving incidents similar to the robberies, rapes, and murders depicted in the film. But the American press isn’t interested in covering things like the recent attempted beheading in Belfast, or even the 250,000 victims of the Pakistani rape gangs in the U.K. It’s a become an inconvenient topic, which is a fairly recent adjustment—I remember the attacks in Nice, Paris, and Manchester getting a lot of coverage only 10 years ago.
After killing even more criminals and eventually police officers, Sanders is told by the chief investigator, Heat-style, “One day I will catch you. You’ve killed innocent people.” He tells the investigator, “These people you speak of… none of them voted for what’s happening. This is an unfriendly takeover by the Islamic Extremists and the blindsided woke left. And if this takeover is successful, it’ll destroy the democracy you say you love—all the freedom, everything you enjoy and stand for. There’s only one option: you end this, or we the people will end it ourselves.” Citizen Vigilante went straight to streaming in America, and I doubt it would even be legal to screen it in Germany. The film ends with the following dedication: “THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO THE THOUSANDS OF RAPE AND MURDER VICTIMS IN EUROPE WHO WERE BETRAYED BY OUR LEGAL SYSTEM.” All of a sudden, for horrible reasons, Uwe Boll becomes a relevant filmmaker for the first time in his life. I hope he continues working in the hot button topic genre, because this is better than anything Radu Jude or Boots Riley have done lately.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM