2026 | Unrated | starring Armie Hammer, Costas Mandylor | written & directed by Uwe Boll | 1 hr 29 mins | 1 1/2 out of 5 |
Fed-up with the European justice system letting criminals back onto the street, wealthy landlord Michael Sanders (Armie Hammer) takes the law into his own hands, hunting down a group of teenagers that gang rapped a girl as well as the judges and family and anyone else in his way, that allowed it to happen.
On the Mount Rushmore of so-bad-they’re-good moviemakers today you’ve got of course Tommy Wiseau, you’ve got Neil Breen, probably James Nguyen and then you’ve got German madman Uwe Boll. What separates Boll from Wiseau, Breen and Nguyen is that, while equally incompetent, his movies don’t seem to be self-indulgent vanity projects attempting to make the world aware of his own awesomeness. He doesn’t cast himself as the hero who saves the world and gets all the girls. And my God he is prolific. Boll has spent decades scouring around making zero-budget junk from video game IPs, trashing House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, the anarchist Postal and subjecting us to the fat-chick-fights-Nazi’s anti-comedy Blubberlla.
And yet, right now, Boll is the right man to capture the zeitgeist. He’s insane enough, self-financed enough and critically insulated enough to take on the topic of European migrant crisis, rape gangs and the governments that cover it up (lifting actual judge speeches for his villains) without a studio over his shoulder nixing the whole idea because this is a third rail topic that nobody in Hollywood or beyond wants to touch. I can’t deny, it’s kind of a thrill to watch and I have to give it points for originality. In a sea of movies taking down Nazis and tech bros again, this was refreshing.
But anyone going into Citizen Vigilante expecting even a remotely normal one-man-army revenge film are going to be shocked by the package here. You got to take the bad with the good here and despite decades of experience, Boll has never learned or doesn’t care to know how movies are made. What you’re going to get here is a movie that lacks the most basic fundamental understanding of how stories are told, movies are made, why montages and time-jumps are used and how to connect a scene from A to B. You’re going to see incoherence on a level that you take for granted in the worst Hollywood movies. The lighting, the camera framing, the editing, the sets, the wardrobe, every little thing that a professional production is able to quality control and safeguard against fails here. It’s why you may see me score some movies higher than they should be when the story is bad, because something like this is always a possibility.
Like Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, Citizen Vigilante jumps us in media res. Sanders has been running around killing people in a black coat for some time now and he’s a worldwide internet and media sensation. Subtly isn’t in Boll’s vocabulary and for a movie making a statement like this we can argue it shouldn’t be, opening loudly with a mother getting a 12-inch knife in her neck while walking through a park. What could have gotten by with a simple revenge story where Sanders plows through thugs and judges is turned into an incoherent puzzle by Boll’s desire to overcomplicate the narrative, shifting time so often that it’s not clear for a good while what the present-day story even is. The central set piece seems to be the city police, arming up in tanks and raiding Sanders’ apartment building. It’s clear that Boll got access to the military trucks for a day and shot the hell out of it, filling the movie with glory shots of these trucks rolling through the city on a seemingly endless journey to get to Sanders’ apartment. The movie cuts back and forth from that to Sanders inspecting his properties, loading his guns, taking meetings, being interviewed by someone and making videos before the cops complete the half day quest across town to get to him.
Typically, if you were to build your movie around this kind of flashback structure you would give the audience a clue as to what is in the past and what is in the future. Maybe it is lit differently, maybe your character has been punched in the nose and has a scar in the flash-forwards. Here, Armie Hammer wears the same black trenchcoat in every scene, and every scene has the exact same color pallet and style. Save for that interrogation scene which is never paid off or explained. Is it the cops, Interpol, a business associate, media? Who knows? Boll sure doesn’t.
This is a deadly serious subject that Boll takes seriously, which is partially why it becomes so unintentionally funny. Highlights include scenes like a judge being kidnapped shot from the backseat of a car so you can’t see our hero delivering his big monologue, a montage of Sanders taking pictures of his property and a scene where he visits a prostitute den and stops the hooker halfway to lecture her on preventing the spread of mold. Sex and violence are kept mostly offscreen in favor of scene of Sanders loading and cleaning his guns. None of the revenge sequences are clever or creative. Boll wields his anti-hero like a hammer and everyone else is a nail, bluntly killing people off with slit wrists and head-shots. Every situation he gets into, he easily gets out of with no struggle or opposition. The police chief seemingly on his tail (Costas Mandylor, 24) poses no threat at all. Sanders is never challenged in any way. I get it. Citizen Vigilante is an uneven mix of cathartic violent release against the system as well as a “cautionary tale” about how that corruption can create this kind of mob justice the system shouldn’t want and may not be able to control. The movie doesn’t work as either.
The best part of Citizen Vigilante is Armie Hammer. I won’t deny I like seeing him back. Hammer’s prescience, his buttery smooth vocal fry, and his commitment to this project does wonders to make Boll’s dialogue not seem completely ridiculous. Even when he’s repeating the same lines back to back in different tones, I had fun watching him (“You let a rapist go free. You let a rapist… go free.”). Like Boll, Hammer was an actor with nothing to lose and a perfect fit for this part. That’s the long-term problem those promoting a cancel culture didn’t think about. Once someone has nothing else to lose, they’re free to speak the unspeakable, mock those we aren’t supposed to mock, to make your hero a landlord (which for some reason our overlords hate more than anything) and touch the third rails Hollywood says not to. Citizen Vigilante is a huge mess, but it couldn’t have been made any other way.