We all already know that Uwe Boll is a very bad director. That’s been chronicled for decades, and while it’s perhaps somewhat impressive that he’s not learned anything about how to make a movie over the years, it doesn’t seem likely to ever change. But his latest, the deliberately controversy-courting anti-immigration action movie Citizen Vigilante, is the sort of terrible that you really must capture in words, lest it get away with it. We don’t even need to factor in the racism, misogyny and full-throated dehumanization of immigrants, because this is a hilarious inept film in every possible regard.
The elevator pitch for Citizen Vigilante doesn’t exactly sound great, but it does at least sound like a coherent film: Armie Hammer’s Sanders is a man on a mission. Wives and mothers are being murdered all around Europe by “undocumented immigrants,” so our man is on a spree to enact revenge on every illegal immigrant and person who defends them, determined to seek revenge through their bloody deaths. OK, sure, gross, but a film-shaped thing. Except that’s not at all what we have here. Citizen Vigilante isn’t even capable of establishing this outline of a plot. It’s just a series of scenes, barely attached to one another, each uniquely poorly made.
Vigilante begins with a cold open showing a woman’s death. With an establishing shot of a Croatian city, the film immediately gives us a sense of place by filling the screen with the word “EUROPE,” before cutting (and cutting, and cutting) to a lady and her son in a convenience store. The two leave together to walk down the street outside when a random guy with a knife brutally stabs her in the neck. Blood sprays from her neck as if from a garden hose while her son watches, and we’re off!
Oh wait, no, sorry, we’re not off at all. We now have a solid 40 minutes of almost nothing happening at the most meandering pace. Following the death of this nameless woman (who is never mentioned again for the whole film, and nor is her son for that matter), we’re told by a hilariously poor impression of a news program that in response there’s now an unknown vigilante on a killing spree. Except, instead of then seeing any of this spree take place, we’re given scenes of a police chief and his vast squads of heavily armored men with machine guns making there way to capture the killer, which is only ever intercut with never-explained scenes of characters who’ll immediately vanish, and Sanders’ banal and seemingly random interactions with strangers.
Sanders is on a bus when three rowdy teenagers get on and refuse to pay for their tickets. The driver demands they pay their “one-fifty” again and again, until Sanders stands up and…yells at the driver. He needs to get where he’s going! (He doesn’t.) The drivers says, word for word, “It’s just the thing that I will not continue driving the bus without everyone having tickets on it,” so Sanders gets out his wallet and counts out, weirdly slowly, a single note from a bundle of cash. The driver takes the money and says, “One-fifty times three, four-fifty, here you go, let me give you your change.” This is the movie! This is what we have to sit through. But it’s about to get so much better.
Sanders sits down next to the teens and now it’s going to kick off, right? These awful, cruel children, they need to be punished. And they are. Sanders begins an uninterrupted lecture on the economic consequences of their not buying tickets. I quote, in full:
Pay attention, let me explain this to you. If you get onto a bus and you don’t pay your ticket, if you go to the movie theater, if you grab a banana at the grocery store and you don’t pay, eventually the cost of everything will go up. If ten percent doesn’t pay, the cost will go up ten percent [awkward pause] to cover the loss. And that’s not fair.
I’m still not entirely clear why going to the movie theater is in itself a problem, but Armie Hammer says it very sternly, so let’s not question it.
But there’s an even weirder lecture to come, and still before we see our hero kill a single person. The film continues to intersperse Hammer’s deathly boring scenes with ever-escalating news coverage of the vigilante killing spree, more frantic police reaction, and some knuckle-chewingly awful confessional scenes in which Hammer is attempting naturalistic acting to camera, but still not a single moment of any of the violence that’s been alluded to actually happening. It’s so weird. You start to feel like the film is gaslighting you into believing you’re seeing these exciting sequences of Tarantino-like violence. But instead we get a scene that I think really should go down in cinematic history as one of the most unintentionally, hilariously awkward scenes of all time:
Sanders visits a brothel, and we lasciviously stare at the bodies of a number of women until Hammer makes his pick. Is he going to murder her for some reason? Is he about to grill her for information on the whereabouts of some evil immigrants? Nope, no, he’s going to have sex with her. We get to watch the negotiation over the price, because this film is obsessed with correct payments, and then a very, very boring sex scene, that is interrupted by…Look, I’m just so excited I get to tell you about this! Sanders stops mid-thrust upon noticing there’s mold in the corner of the room. He leaps up, stares at it for so, so long, and then—this is too good—gives this woman a lecture on the importance of opening windows when using the shower.
When you let clients shower in the bathroom after you’re done do you open the window? If you let them shower and it gets hot, the steam builds up. Then you get mold in the room.
I swear to god.
Then they get back to bed.
The first time Sanders kills anyone arrives 45 minutes into the film, and it’s the wanton and needless slaughter of a roomful of cops. These people arrive at an apartment in which Sanders is taking cover behind a giant metal sheet with two holes for machine guns to poke through. The cops bust the flimsy-looking door down (using the tiniest explosive ever, then a ram!) and line up in front of this very obvious deathtrap. They stand still in a neat row while their boss instructs Sanders to give himself up or they’ll shoot at his bulletproof box with guns sticking out of it. And so they shoot at the bulletproof box, and Sanders shoots back and eviscerates them in a hail of bullets that lasts for so very, very long.
And I mean eviscerates. These officers helpfully refuse to move from the spot as they’re shot, hundreds and hundreds of times, bits of their bodies being shorn off in a fireworks show of spraying blood. Then one man’s HEAD EXPLODES. Literally, it goes BANG! And his jaw flops off to the side in slow-motion, brain matter scattered. Did he have a grenade in his brain? We shall never know.
So, with that done, it’s time for more action as Sanders visits the building rental company that he owns for a meeting with one of his managers. We are treated to a five-minute-long scene in which he angrily demands that his staff evict any tenant who is four weeks late with payment, even if it’s against the law to do so, and if the delinquent tenants won’t go, for his workers to let him know so that his “people” can “sort it out.” His manager is horrified, attempts an appeal to basic human decency, and is furiously scolded. So our hero’s a slumlord?! We’re supposed to be sympathizing with the slumlord? Yes, the right hates it when people get away without paying rent for months at a time, but the scenes are so badly written and shot that he’s just framed as being in the wrong. On his way out Sanders complains that “it smells like a nursing home in here” because of the age of his staff. Super guy.
Sanders then visits an unidentified family to ask if they got justice after their daughter was attacked, sets up a boobytrap in his kill room that will soon burn another wave of cops to death, and drugs and kidnaps a judge whose rulings he doesn’t like. To teach the (unconscious) judge a lesson, he, um, forces another car off the road and causes it to explode, with his point apparently being that people will die rather than break the law, since that car’s driver could have simply also swerved into the other lane and survived? All this to make a point to the judge who is asleep from the injection of heroin Sanders gave him.
“You let a gang of rapists go. You know what that makes you? Just as bad as the perpetrators. You might as well have raped her yourself.” Fierce logic. He then slits the judge’s wrists and leaves him in his car.
It’s not until 76 minutes in that Citizen Vigilante switches from farcically dreadful incoherent mess into something truly abhorrent. Sanders shows up at the home of a Muslim family, whose teenage son was found guilty of rape (along with his friends), but released into rehabilitation services rather than sent to prison. His mom, dad and sister are there too, and Sanders shoots the boy in the knee and demands they all sit on a couch. He details the teenager’s brutal crime, and then explains his fury that the young man is not in prison. The kid responds that he’s in therapy now, that he and his friends are working to fix their lives, to change who they are, to become better people. His father explains they fled a civil war in their country. “Do you know what I think?” asks Sanders. “I don’t think it was the good ones that got out of your country. I think it was the bad ones.” So Sanders makes him call his friends to come over, then repeatedly shoots everyone in the room, mom, dad, sister and all. His justification? Their “archaic value system and…commitment to religion.” Just in case there was any ambiguity.
And that, mercifully, is the only time Hammer’s character is actually shown killing any immigrants in this movie that purports to be about a vigilante killer of immigrants. We’re told over and over by the squirm-inducing news broadcasts that he’s just doing it all the time, but only ever shown his very private lecture series and bizarre hatred for his tenants. The scene above takes place a couple of minutes before the end, which is a bemusing muddle of the police chief (he survived the fire!) in the hospital saying he’s going to arrest Sanders, and then another news broadcast in which we’re now told that the judge was the third of his kind that Sanders had staged a suicide for. And then that’s it. It just stops, fading to black and then the words,
This film is dedicated to the thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system.
I cannot stress enough how incoherent this film is. It doesn’t take place in any order that makes sense, with Sanders visiting families or victims of crimes who are never introduced or explained in scenes that never cohere with any other events. It’s edited so poorly that you’ll often see the same moment taking place twice from two different angles, entirely accidentally (Homicide: Life on the Street this is not), let alone the completely random order of the scenes themselves. There are even moments when exactly the same footage is later repeated, and scenes where two different pieces of music crash into one another. Those confessionals to camera? Never explained. The woman he visits in the hospital who makes very clear how much she doesn’t want his “help”? Never identified, not connected to anyone else. It’s batshit.
It especially doesn’t help that Hammer absolutely cannot act, and speaks in this strained attempt at baritone that has the rather unfortunate effect of making him sound uncannily like one-time GamerGate side-character Davis Aurini. He fits in with the rest of the cast, however, who appear to be mostly bemused Croatians not entirely sure why they’re there.
So yes, it’s eventually disgustingly racist and Islamophobic, but in such an inept and incoherent way. And as such, it doesn’t even cater to the audience you’d expect it was hoping to garner. Those who wanted to watch a violent action movie about a white guy murdering evil migrants instead get a film about the importance of good ventilation in brothels, and the economic impact of skipping fares. There are a total of two violent scenes (three if you count Hammer stamping on those bus teens’ hands a bit later on), and one of them is the wanton slaughter of police seemingly just doing their job. (And yes, ACAB, etc, but that’s not a message endorsed by this film’s intended audience!) It’s all so poorly made that it constantly seems like it’s trying to set Sanders up as a bad guy, but then celebrates his actions. There’s non-stop dissonance over whether we’re supposed to be on his side or not, until its ending makes it clear we were meant to root for him all along.
The ending scene shows Sanders inexplicably appearing on the TV of one of the families he visited earlier in the film, with the father and daughter staring in awe and delight at the vigilante’s message that it’s now time for you, the viewing audience, to continue where he’s left off. It’s time for us to kill immigrants we don’t like (and their families). This is unambiguously and unironically the message we’re meant to take away, and as such you can see how understandable (if ultimately self-defeating) it is that the German ratings board refused Citizen Vigilante a certificate. You can also see why famous Nazi Elon Musk would have wanted to spread the movie far and wide.
No one is shocked that Uwe Boll has made another woefully dreadful movie, of course. But I think there’s something especially impressive about doing it this badly. It’s absolutely not worth sitting through, because it’s so agonizingly dull for 75 minutes, and then so grossly racist for 10. Yes, the bus and brothel scenes will live with me forever, and let’s hope they’re quickly clipped to the socials for everyone’s convenience, but they’re not worth the barely acted snore-fest that surrounds them.
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