The sociopathic main character attempts to restore law and order when authorities fail.
The controversial film Citizen Vigilante gained traction when it recently streamed for free on X (formerly Twitter) for 48 hours.
Since then, it began trending on various platforms, including on Amazon Prime where it can be rented or purchased.
As [your]NEWS has previously explained, Citizen Vigilante has drawn attention for a storyline centered on an American living in Europe who takes action after becoming frustrated with crime involving migrants.
As a preliminary matter, Citizen Vigilante doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a typical review.
Citizen Vigilante seems disjointed, with some clunky dialogue, and often lackluster acting, plus what appears to be a lot of CGI blood.
As implied above, its flaws as a work of cinema seem less significant that its theme, i.e., the indifference by virtue-signaling elites to the societal consequences of open borders.
It’s metaphorically like a dashboard warning light — on a clunker.
The movie even seems like it was released unfinished or before the final cut. As an analogy to the printed page, perhaps like a rough draft.
In case anyone missed the point, however, a graphic on screen as the end credits roll reads as follows: “This film is dedicated to the thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system.”
Citizen Vigilante takes place in an unnamed European country, but was shot in Croatia, and in good news for those with a limited attention span, it runs just 89 minutes.
It has been panned by so-called professional critics, but that should be expected in that most entertainment journalists view content through an ideological lens.
For example, on Rotten Tomatoes, Citizen Vigilante has an overly generous 91 percent positive rating from users, but a mostly “rotten” rating from critics.
Independent filmmaker Uwe Boll, the writer, producer, and director of Citizen Vigilante, has 261 credits in his IMDB filmography.
He is perhaps best known for low budget, direct-to-video action flicks (including live-action versions of video games), sometimes referred to as exploitation movies, that are anything but masterpieces.
This particular film was banned, at least initially, in Boll’s home country of Germany.
While promoting the film on various online platforms, Boll has made no secret of his disdain for the current political/legal system in the European Union that he described in an interview on the Midnight’s Edge podcast as “perpetrator protection, not victim protection.”
In Europe, as Boll is suggesting, the establishment often treats criminals like victims, and actual victims as almost irrelevant.
It seems to be a manifestation of what evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad has categorized as suicidal empathy.
[America also has a catch-and-release dilemma in some jurisdictions, particularly those where Democrats are in charge, including for homegrown offenders.]
Authorities in Germany possibly are wary of the movie inspiring a real-world copycat which obviously would be a ghastly outcome.
Boll insisted, however, during that same interview that “you cannot as a filmmaker say I’m taking responsibility if somebody runs amok because you, whatever, did a movie like this…I don’t think based on the movie people will do violent acts…”
Armie Hammer, whose career was in limbo owing to a #MeToo scandal, plays the protagonist, Sanders, a stoic U.S. army veteran and real estate mogul in the unnamed EU country, where he, ironically, is a non-citizen.
In addition to a vendetta against soft-on-crime judges and denouncing what he calls “woke leftists,” the Sanders character separately has disdain for courts that are too lenient on tenants who fall behind on their rent at his properties.
Leaving aside any off-screen contretemps, Hammer does have a commanding move-star presence, a quality often missing in mainstream productions.
Some spoilers and plot observations follow.
The film opens with an anonymous quote: “All behavior can be tracked back to instincts. When justice is denied, instincts turn to vengeance.”
From there, it depicts a young mother brutally and fatally stabbed in a random attack. That attacker has just a cameo appearance and is not someone that Sanders tracks down or even attempts to.
Citizen Vigilante has been compared to the original Death Wish starring the iconic movie star Charles Bronson, plus other similar revenge yarns.
In Citizen Vigilante, however, unlike most of those other films, Sanders doesn’t seem to have a direct personals stake in what he does.
Without any backstory, Sanders is already doing his thing when the movie gets underway, which – as portrayed on screen — wins praise from TikTok (or the equivalent) users.
Sanders himself occasionally goes online with his face pixilated to ominously communicate with the public. “…Remember: I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself.”
Keep in mind that the Sanders character is no hero by any means. He is a sociopath who doesn’t hesitate to kill innocent people.
And most of those who Sander kills in the movie are not migrants.
That said, the scene that has received the most notoriety is when he decides to “have a little chat” with several young men who gang-raped a teenage girl, after which the courts let them off the hook.
This occurs after Sanders visits the victim to verify that she wants justice.
With video cameras everywhere, and other sophisticated investigatory techniques, police would have likely apprehended Sanders quickly in the real world. In the context of the movie, it’s not even clear how they tracked him down in the first place, other than by far-fetched chance in a bar.
Some very reckless police activity subsequently occurs that leads to a bloodbath.
The scene where Sanders and later the Interpol agent both visit a female crime victim in the hospital seems to have no connection with anything else that transpires.
The scene that takes place in a brothel seems to have no purpose in advancing the plot, although it’s perhaps intentionally or unintentionally funny.
The sequence where Sanders explains to fare jumpers how that behavior negatively effects society as a whole is actually well written. A subsequent encounter, though, reveals that the teens are slow learners.
Citizen Vigilante has 6 out of 10 user review rating on IMDB, with many negative reviews.
One user, in particular, seemed to get to the essence of Citizen Vigilante:
“The film delivers an exceptionally bold message, especially by today’s standards, but from a technical standpoint, it falls short. Aside from the lead actor, most of the performances are quite weak, and the direction often feels amateurish. That said, it’s still worth watching despite its flaws, given how relevant the subject matter is in today’s world.”
Citizen Vigilante reportedly had a $2 million budget, which is very modest by contemporary movie standards. By late June, it had generated about $600K in revenue.
A report by the Puck news outlet claims that Armie Hammer described the finished product as “hateful” and “disgusting.”
It’s difficult to believe that the information supposedly obtained from “a source in Hammer’s camp” is accurate in that the actor obviously read the script and carried out the script’s requirements in front of the camera.
Citizen Vigilante 2 is reportedly in the works. Whether the follow-up will have better production values and a better script, and whether Hammer will reprise his role, remains to be seen.
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