Warning: There will be some spoilers in this review.
Near the beginning of the movie "Goodfellas", the late Ray Liotta's "Henry Hill" gives a pretty solid capsule history of most organized crime movements. They spring up when regular schnooks can't get justice through the legitimate, or "legitimate", authorities.
(That's not the spoiler. If you haven't seen "Goodfellas", I'm not sure what to do with you).
Of course, the "justice" almost inevitably comes with a price that ranges from "society-rotting" to "catastrophic". The agents and dealers of the "justice" tend to enforce unwritten "laws" handed down from some variety of strongman - who usually became the "strongman" because he beat down, usually killed, the other, slightly weaker, strongmen.
And throughout human history, it's been much more the norm than the exception - from the kings of every monarchy of ancient times (who, for all of the pomp and pageantry they accreted after the 17th Century, attained their stature for the most part in the same way the fictional Tony Camonte or Don Corleone, or the real life Carlo Gambino or Al Capone, did) to the guys running drug the drug rackets in the projects in Baltimore or Newark today.
Throughout almost all of human history, from the dawn of organized civilization until the framing of the Constitution, a "change in power" was handled among world governments the same way it's handled among tribes, Mafia families, drug cartels, the USSR, or most of the nations currently on earth; with bloodshed ending in the last people standing taking power until the next "transfer".
We - organized societies for the past few centuries - replaced that with laws, elections, processes to effect the change in power and in the enforcement of the laws that the citizens or subjects follow in exchange for order, protection and (ideally) prosperity.
So - what happens when the "rule of law" gets abrogated by the authorities that the legal system entrusts to enforce it, fairly and objectively?
As someone who lives in a city where people routinely get released on their own recognizance after arrest for violent felonies and the theater kids turned out by the thousands to, basically, protect the smugglers and human traffickers that've made Minneapolis as much a sanctuary for criminals as "undocumented" aliens, and where fraud has been a national story and punch line for years, while the government tries to confiscate your means to self-defense and demonize you for wanting to, I can see where there could stand to be a good movie on the subject of what happens when government sides with the forces of disorder.
"Citizen Vigilante" - which streamed for 48 hours on "X" last weekend - is not that movie.
Not even close.
It's the story of a never-named US Army veteran-cum-businessman, played by Armie Hammer, who is (spoiler alert) the eponymous vigilante, roaming the streets of an unnamed city in "Europe". Where? It doesn't matter - the "Interpol" officer sounds Dutch or Belgian, his "SWAT team" carries French rifles, the vibe of the civil society feels German or Scandinavian - but the geography is the least of the problems.
The Vigilante's mission is to avenge the atrocities carried out by the worst among the wave of migrants that've settled in Europe over the past 20 years. And he does this, taking out a variety of swarthy racketeers, street thugs, and rapists over the course of the movie.
So how does it work?
How do I put this?
I say this as a right-wing guy who sees serious problems with unregulated migration and, especially, the capture of the rule of law by and on behalf of elements hostile to our liberal democratic system - but it's terrible. One of the worst movies I've ever seen, and I walked out of Little Nicky.
Citizen Vigilante is terrible as film-making craft, terrible as a story, and, worst of all, morally depraved to the point of being, essentially, pornography on several levels.
As far as film-making craft goes? It feels like it was edited at random, perhaps by a committee of people who didn't like each other much, working together via Zoom. Long sequences watching the Vigilante lifting weights, but not the faintest exposition of how and why he's on his crusade in the first place. Many movies require "suspension of disbelief" - but there's enough suspending to allow Lizzo to take off vertically from a standing start in this movie. (Semi-spoiler - it features the worst shootout sequence in the history of cinema. How bad? It reminded me of Threat Level Midnight, Michael Scott's amateur, fictional terrible movie from "The Office". I literally laughed out loud.)
The story would need a couple rounds of revision to get to "incoherent" - the dialog, and even the monologues, sound like they were written by AI. And not the smart AI.
But morally?
It's about this point that there's a fork in the road. As bad as the writing and editing and filmmaking craft are, the movie still had a choice:
- Be an exploration of what happens when the rule of law gets perverted against the law-abiding citizen, or
- A bit of pseudo-political pornography - where "pornography" means any sensational, prurient, transgressive content designed to elicit a quick, cheap, extremely intense emotional reaction and dopamine hit.
And over the next hour, the fork is clear. It's porn.
The term "pornography" usually refers to prurient erotic content (and the movie does include one of the cringiest, most gratuitous and pointless sex scenes in the history of cinema), but in this case it's also the pornography of unreasoning violence. The body count is huge, and includes not a few completely innocent people, offed with no more consideration than one might squash a carpet beetle, passed off as a bit of philosophical maundering on the way to another do-it-yourself execution.
But it's even worse than that.
One of the movie's few unifying elements is the Vigilante's video "Manifesto", broadcast to several of the European victims on whose behalf the spree is being, er, spreed. He assails the people - "you are all playthings" - before saying "the universe must balance - yin must match yang". And who's going to balance the universe? "If you won't do anything, I have to do something".
OK, so it's like Charles Bronson's character in "Death Wish" - right?
Well, no - Bronson was avenging the destruction of his family. The Vigilante? In another chapter of his manifesto, he growls out a Nietzsche quote, wondering if that's what was meant by "it's lonely at the top of the mountain of wisdom, a place free from imposed morals, of false religion, of politics..."
And who's going to replace all of that?
The vigilante, of course - the pure power of his will. The Citizen has become, not just an avenger, but the supreme force of reason itself. Like the very neo-Marxist revolutionaries inflicting the whole mess onto society in the first place.
And it's all presented, not as a warning about what happens when society stops trusting society, but as a rah-rah pep show for an Ubermensch.
We rooted for Charles Bronson's "Paul Kersey" because he was righting an objective, personal wrong. We rallied for Clint Eastwood's various anti-heroes, from the Man Without a Name to William Munny to Stanley Kowalski because they were all finding redemption from past sins.
The "Citizen Vigilante"? He's just unironically declared himself, to the alleluiahs of a fictional (?) online mob, as he kills those who deserve it - yay - but also executes those who don't condemn it enough and, in one case, kills a car full of completely unconnected passersby to illustrate a disquisition on Nietzschean philosophy that would get laughed out of Philosophy 202.
Morally? It's a message, and a means, that echo Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, the Jacobins (the French ones as well as the ones from the magazine), and every tyrant who thought the world would be a much better place if we just imposed a little of our own unadulterated will on the situation.
The subject desperately needs a good, even a great, movie.
This is not it.
Conservatives need to make inroads into culture. Congratulations - the right has now made a movie worse than "Ladyballers",
I'm going to put it here so you can judge for yourself. Some parts are extremely, terminally unsafe for work, so you've been warned.
— Dominik Tarczyński MEP (@D_Tarczynski) June 28, 2026
