A load of Bolls

I have a soft spot for both vigilante films and dogshit so-bad-it’s-good-in-a-bad-way movies, making me a natural fan of German director Uwe Boll, who holds the distinction of making some of the worst films ever to stain the silver screen. I believe this affinity, or affliction, positions me well in the human centipede of criticism to evaluate his latest steaming pile, Citizen Vigilante.

Armie Hammer returns from exile as Michael Sanders, a dead-eyed ex-military, daddy-issue-having American slumlord in Europe who deals out street justice. He also kills random innocent people for no reason whatsoever. This happens in between cardboard monologues about the state, migrants, Muslims, and the “woke left.” Some might call it a 4chan screenplay. But there is occasional eloquence even on seedy, anonymous forums that you will not find here. No, these are the rants of social media ragebaiters in the mouth of an utterly uninteresting anti-hero. 

Why, then, is Boll’s latest offering trending right now? Partly because Germany, where censorship is a pastime, attempted to suppress the film, thereby giving Boll the marketing he could never have afforded, ultimately leading Elon Musk to promote the film and help release it on X. But the real reason, however, is its anti-immigrant messaging, which made the film into a cause célèbre in particular for the gutter right in America, so starved for cultural allies that it gaslit itself into hailing Boll as the greatest, bravest auteur of our time, harbinger of “retarded kino” and “basedploitation.”

It’s both funny and a fitting punishment for the worst people to have to carry Boll aloft on their shoulders, who previously financed his films by exploiting a loophole in German tax law that allowed investors to get most of their money back, even if the film flopped. In his own words: “the reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government.” 

That loophole has since closed. But if Boll was looking for a new source of funding, he may well have found it in people who want to see their fantasies of killing migrants and their domestic enemies on the big screen.

Yet even that might be too coherent an overview of Citizen Vigilante, which doesn’t even work as a proper vigilante film. Death Wish, Law Abiding Citizen, Death Sentence, Walking Tall, and virtually every other proper entry in the genre follows the same, powerful formula: a man is wronged by criminals, the system fails to hold them accountable, and then he embarks on a crusade to secure the justice denied him or his loved ones. It works because it appeals to our sense of fairness. We condone the hero’s actions, even though he is breaking the law, because he is sympathetic. But we also see that vigilantism is as much an expression of disorder as it is a reaction to it. That point is often driven home by the collateral damage we witness on the hero’s journey. 

Sanders, in contrast, is not sympathetic. He has no connection to Europe or what is happening there beyond managing a real estate business inherited from his estranged father. Their relationship is never explored, though it seems significant. Instead, we follow Sanders around as he inspects crumbling units, harries employees, and sleeps with prostitutes, interrupted mid-coitus by mold growing on the walls, leading to him doing a kind of American Psycho bedroom bit. He intimidates and then beats up some hooligans. He slaughters a SWAT team in a cartoonish shootout. He causes a fatal car accident, murdering a total stranger, to make a point about how too many people follow the law while explaining that he is against lawlessness. He kills a judge. Kills another judge. Boll seems to reuse footage, shot-for-shot, for these murders. There are also instances where dialogue is repeated in a way that suggests poor editing rather than repetition for rhetorical effect. It’s hardly noticeable because Sanders engages in repetitive rants in between drawn-out filler shots of nothing happening throughout the film.

The most powerful scene is the opening, in which a young mother is brutally murdered by a migrant while walking home with her son. But Boll has blown his proverbial load too soon, and keeps the last of the strong stuff in reserve for the climax, where Sanders calmly slaughters the family of a young Muslim who participated in the gang rape of a girl. No one, not even his teenage sister, is spared. And though it is intended to be the single most controversial scene, it is executed in such a clumsy way, with Sanders reciting lines scraped from right-wing social media posts, that it lands like a wet balloon at your feet. You’re not shocked, just wondering what happened. 

Although the film is set in Europe and supposedly dedicated to victims of rape and murder in Europe, much of the dialogue seems tuned for a particular kind of audience in the United States. Namely, supporters of Donald Trump. Near the end, Sanders tells an Interpol officer who warns that vigilantism makes people unsafe: “These people you speak of. They never voted for what’s happening. This is an unfriendly takeover by the Islamist 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.” It’s a monologue indistinguishable from the sort of thing you hear from MAGA influencers looking to drive engagement with ragebait.

Boll is, in a sense, the ultimate populist filmmaker

Well, Boll got what he wanted after so long. He found the only audience to consider him a serious filmmaker with something to say, and only because what he is saying reflects the violent fever dreams of those who have no real solutions, like Sanders, who comes across more like real-life Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivik than a Paul Kersey. Some have defended the film by arguing that it serves a crucial, underserved viewership, the “silent majority” of cinema. The same could be said of a film adaptation of The Turner Diaries, an infamous white supremacist novel about a man who wages a race war against nonwhites, the state, and traitors to the cause. In a way, Citizen Vigilante is The Turner Diaries for certain people. On X, one person shared an image of an armed Sanders captioned, “First the traitors, then the invaders.” Ever eager to demonstrate his “based” bona fides, Musk replied: “Yes.” Boll would undoubtedly recoil at the notion that his film endorses such horrific things as these. If that’s the case, why does Sanders repeatedly state that others should imitate his actions? Actions depicted as wholly good and wholly without downside. 

Boll is, in a sense, the ultimate populist filmmaker. He identifies real issues, uses them for self-serving purposes, and then channels anger in unproductive and destructive directions. It makes his newfound alliance with MAGA fitting.