‘Citizen Vigilante’ Review

Armie Hammer in Citizen Vigilante. (Courtesy Quiver Distribution)

THERE ARE FEW DISREPUTABLE GENRES I unironically love quite so dearly as the vigilante flick. Putting a random man or woman into a maelstrom of disorder and watching them sort it out with muzzle flashes and hot lead is cinema in its purest, darkest form: a channeling of the social id in ways that can be both rousing and discomfiting, ways that reveal not only how the world works (or doesn’t), but who we are.

The urban chaos of the 1970s led to Michael Winner’s trilogy of Death Wish films with Charles Bronson, an increasingly deranged orgy of violence that often owed more to the dream logic of a nightmare than feature filmmaking. On the classier side of the spectrum, you get stuff like Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington’s Equalizer trilogy, a series of films in which an Oscar-caliber actor is tasked with answering questions like ‘How many ways can you kill a scumbag in a Home Depot?’ You want a woman-led iteration? Might I interest you in Jodie Foster’s The Brave One, Jennifer Garner’s Peppermint, or Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown?

I preface my review of Citizen Vigilante with this disclaimer so you’ll understand that I’m no snob when it comes to this sort of movie. I’d rather watch James Wan’s Death Sentence than any of his better-known and more successful horror films; the only Steven Seagal movies that are any good follow the three-word rule of Hard to Kill/Marked for Death/On Deadly Ground. Hopefully, then, you’ll believe me when I say that the problem with Citizen Vigilante is not that it’s rancid, fascistic dog shit. Worse than that: It’s incompetently made dog shit.

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Screenshot from a scene widely circulated on social media, showing Hammer’s character (right) shooting several people. (Via X)

THAT THE GERMAN DIRECTOR UWE BOLL made an idiosyncratically incompetent film is not particularly surprising, given that he is generally known for idiosyncratic incompetence. Often described as one of the worst directors ever to make films—a constant refrain that led to him literally beating up critics in a boxing ring—Boll first gained prominence as a director of awful video game adaptations, singlehandedly setting back the video game movie genre by decades with stinkers like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and BloodRayne.

Boll’s career exists largely thanks to a combination of quirks in the film industry, namely the DVD boom of the early 2000s in which sales to video rental houses like Blockbuster could make nearly any movie profitable if it was produced for little enough, and a German tax loophole that led to massive rebates for financiers. Since the collapse of both of those trends, he’s tended toward outrage cinema with movies like the sardonically 9/11-themed Postal and 2013’s Occupy Wall Street–minded Assault on Wall Street, a movie that suggested the bank bailouts should be met with mass shootings.

Citizen Vigilante has a ripped-from-the-headlines quality that feels even more ripped than usual thanks to the heavy and obvious use of ADR, a technique by which dialogue is dubbed into a film to add jokes or provide extra background. For one extended sequence, the camera alternates between the backs of the heads of Michael Sanders (Armie Hammer), the titular citizen, and Judge Reinhold¹ (Roni Lepej), a magistrate he has drugged and kidnapped, and Reinhold’s lolling face. Over these images, we hear Sanders ranting about the judge releasing a pack of gang rapists because they are immigrants who “just had an adjustment issue.” Watching the movie, you couldn’t help but wonder if Boll saw the outrage over stories like this one about a psychologist suggesting “gang rape may have been a way to vent ‘frustration’’ due to ‘migration experiences and sociocultural homelessness’” and was like ‘Okay, we’ve got to shoehorn that in there, it doesn’t matter how shoddy it looks.’

Shoddiness is the keyword with this film. Even though you instinctively know it’ll look like a cheap hunk of junk, you’re still kind of surprised how bad the computer-generated blood spatters are; the degenerate in me yearns for the more pleasing (and more expensive) practical effect of exploding blood squibs. In another sequence, Boll seems to have paid to flip a car and then, for some reason, superimposed the worst explosion you’ve ever seen on top of it, the CGI fire assaulting your eyes like so many migrant supercriminals whose stab wounds lead to fountains of fake blood flowing from the necks of our beautiful, endangered mothers.

This slipshod quality also applies to the narrative, which is functionally nonexistent. In your traditional vigilante movie, the movement of action is pretty straightforward: Trauma combined with official indifference leads to one man taking justice into his own hands. But Citizen Vigilante begins in medias res, with people singing the praises of the unnamed vigilante citizen on social media while news reports hammer home the deadly plague of migrant rapist murderers. Sanders has suffered no trauma; he’s mostly just annoyed by what he sees. His distaste for disorder is almost aesthetic. Instead of a normal narrative, Boll disjointedly interweaves different strands of the story from slightly different moments in the film’s chronology, lending the film a sort of chaotic presentation of reality that coheres only when we pause long enough for Sanders to explicitly state the film’s themes.

If I were inclined to make a case for this film on an artistic level, I would suggest this incompetence is intentional, that Sanders is a madman driven to murder by the ravages of social media’s context collapse. And make no mistake: He is quite mad. This is the sort of guy who goes to a brothel and gets distracted mid-thrust by black mold, leading him to spend thirty seconds explaining the importance of ventilation to a woman more concerned about collecting $30 for shifting to a second position after coitus resumes. Say what you will about Armie Hammer,² the man’s got movie-star good looks and a thousand-yard stare that will freeze you to the bone. Sanders is as deranged as Paul Schrader’s Travis Bickle or Alan Moore’s Rorschach, a lonely man whose online journaling makes your skin crawl.

No wonder, then, that he’s become a hero to Elon Musk—whose social media platform hosted a full, freely available version of the film, and who has repeatedly used his own account, the biggest in the world, to promote the movie—and to other lonely men whose online ravings render them unfit for decent society.

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Hammer (there’s that thousand-yard stare) and Désirée Giorgetti in Citizen Vigilante. (Courtesy Quiver Distribution)

IT IS WORTH TAKING THE SUCCESS of this film seriously if only because the entire genre is a useful window into social anxieties. The success of the Death Wish movies is pretty self-explanatory in the era of a pre-Disneyfied Times Square. But the last twenty years of Hollywood have been dominated by the superhero genre, a supersized form of vigilantism that often tried to square undemocratic exigencies with the needs of the polity; I would not be the first to suggest that this entire multibillion-dollar cinematic movement was a response to the trauma of 9/11, the masterpiece of which is The Dark Knight.

It’s been amusing to watch the right-wing intelligentsia rally behind Boll’s trashterpiece, given his own contempt for their current standard-bearer. In a 2018 interview on director Joe Dante’s podcast, he mocked the people who voted for Trump: “He was lying and lying and lying. And his politic [sic] is only to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. But the people don’t know that. Because it’s kind of a fascist channel with Fox News. . . . Just spreading out lies, like blurring the facts, and that should be shut down.”

This is almost literally the plot of Citizen Vigilante. But Boll is an inveterate populist, and the film’s ire is directed much more pointedly against the judges who free rapists and the cops who try to stop Sanders than it is toward the immigrants themselves. One pack of gang rapists is murdered, yes, but Boll spends much more time with Sanders preparing to gun down an entire SWAT team (or whatever the Interpol equivalent is), leeringly filming them getting blown apart once they arrive at his rental home. The filthy migrants aren’t really the problem, you see; it’s the people who excuse the filthy migrants who must be dealt with.

Which is why the film has inspired noted South African expat Elon Musk and others to openly call for the murder of those officials who do not act strongly against the arrival of the swarthy hordes. I typically shy away from using the word “fascist” to describe a work of art I dislike, but this picture’s proponents are actively calling for a night of long knives against cultural traitors, so I think it fits.

This is why attention must be paid to the success of this movie. And it is a viral success, thanks to the publicity of Musk and others; as I write this, it’s currently the number-one movie on Amazon’s rental charts and the number-two movie on Apple’s. It doesn’t really matter that the movie is, objectively, pretty terrible: The subject matter is striking a chord. And simply ignoring public sentiment on this front is unlikely to make it go away.

1. Say what you will about Boll, but credit where it’s due: that’s a funny character name.

2. Hammer was famously canceled following accusations that he was a sexual cannibal and had assaulted a sexual partner, though I have always found his defense on the second count relatively persuasive.