Vigilante Filmmaking

Uwe Boll is widely considered a terrible filmmaker. When it comes to the pantheon of cinematic trash, the German-born director has created some truly dreadful films. Despite what some critics say, his work does not, in fact, fall into the “so bad it’s good” category. For that, I’d recommend checking out Andy Sidaris’s B-movie action romp Hard Ticket to Hawaii or Russ Meyer’s busty cult classic Supervixens. The difference is that those directors were fully in on the joke, crafting self-referential works of schlock genius. In short, there are bad movies, and then there are Uwe Boll movies. 

This brings us to Boll’s latest effort, Citizen Vigilante, a film proving that even a notoriously bad director can occasionally stumble upon something interesting. On its surface, the movie aims to tackle a well-known genre. For decades, filmmakers have explored the concept of vigilante justice to tap into audience anxieties, stretching from Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974), which captured the raw fear and frustration Americans felt regarding the urban crime and lawlessness of 1970s New York City, to Jason Eisener’s stylized, blood-soaked grindhouse carnage in Hobo with a Shotgun. But Boll isn’t simply recycling old exploitation tropes: he has modernized the genre to reflect a contemporary, real-world panic. 

The film serves as a comeback vehicle for Armie Hammer—marking his first lead role since his five-year exile in “Hollywood prison” following his public cancellation. Hammer stars as Sanders, a wealthy American businessman living in Europe who becomes consumed by the breakdown of law and order. Enraged by a legal system that allows violent offenders to walk free, he decides to take the law into his own hands. We watch as a civilian transforms into an extrajudicial executioner, embarking on a bloody rampage targeting immigrant criminals, corrupt officials, and the lenient judges who allow them to escape justice. As footage of his street justice spreads, Sanders becomes a social media star—a digital Dirty Harry. While the local populace idolizes him as a folk hero, his crusade puts him directly at odds with Interpol Chief Henry (Costas Mandylor), who views Sanders as a reckless criminal and a dangerous threat to society. 

Due to the spicy subject matter, the film has been effectively banned in Germany for “inciting violence against migrants.” According to Boll, Citizen Vigilante was directly inspired by a notorious 2016 court case in Hamburg, Germany, where a group of teenagers—several of whom were migrants—gang-raped a 14-year-old girl and left her for dead, only for the perpetrators to be handed suspended sentences. In a separate, highly publicized case in 2020, a 15-year-old girl was gang-raped in a Hamburg park by a group consisting mainly of teenage migrants. To further inflame tensions, a German woman who insulted one of the rapists online was given a prison sentence, while the attackers themselves avoided jail time.