Review: Citizen Vigilante
Citizen Vigilante is not only a vicious film, it is an extraordinarily stupid film. Directed by Uwe Boll, the German director behind the films Rampage and Darfur (previously best known for making video games into movies), it stars Armie Hammer (real name Armand Hammer, like the abrasive smokers’ toothpaste) as a former American army officer who goes around an unnamed European city (though it is mostly shot in Zagreb, Croatia) with an automatic pistol issuing homilies about fairness and the rule of law in between dispensing violent ‘justice’ to criminals and the judges who let them off, while posting pixellated videos on social media, castigating the ‘takeover’ of western society by immigrants and the “woke left”, proclaiming that he is doing this for the people “until they learn to do it themselves”. His exploits are interspersed with amateurish fake news footage as a breathless female presenter tells us about the immigrant crimewave and how women are afraid to walk the streets or let their children play outside as well as admiring social media videos saying “we need someone like him in Canada/Germany/wherever”. The film can be watched on YouTube for free at present: [1], [2].
The plot is detailed on the film’s Wikipedia entry. Hammer’s character kills three racketeers who had been planning to raid his shop and burn it down. An Interpol chief appears on TV, suggesting that the vigilante is part of some sort of Russian- and Chinese-backed international terrorist cell; meanwhile, Mr Toothpaste pays the bus fare of three local yobs who had refused to pay before delivering one of his lectures on fairness. He visits a badly-injured rape victim in hospital who initially tells him she wants her attackers imprisoned for the rest of their lives; when he explains what going to trial would mean and asks “do you want justice?”, she says yes. A group of armed police make their way to his flat while he has a worker in one of his brothels perform a sex act on him before he tells her to open the windows when clients shower, to stop mould growing on the walls. A police SWAT team raid his flat and find he has built himself a mini fortress with two weapons protruding; police open fire when he refuses to surrender, he fires on them and a number are killed. Later on, when the building is raided in his absence, police open the lid of a booby-trapped container which explodes in their face, killing several more cops and injuring the Interpol chief.
He kidnaps a judge who had passed a comically ‘woke’ sentence on a group of young rapists and given a TV address describing the attackers as victims, driving him to a remote place before killing him in a way that was meant to look like suicide (though he took the weapon with him). He then goes to the home of one of the gang rapists where he, his parents and his sister are eating dinner. He tells the rapist to call the other perpetrators and tell them to come around on a pretext, while interrogating him and his family. The rapist said he was getting psychiatric help and would be better in the future, the sister makes excuses for him, saying the women in Europe go round in miniskirts with their breasts on display, while the father said he had the Qur’an and his family values. Mr Toothpaste responded that his values were archaic and that it was the bad people who had come out of their home countries, not the good. When the other perpetrators arrive, he ushers them into the room where the family are sitting, killing them in front of the family then murdering the family.
If there had been a genre of vigilante movies already, this would stand as a parody of it with only a couple of changes. The sheer hypocrisy of Hammer’s character undermines his ruthless righteousness. He is a scoundrel, a brothel owner, a slum landlord, a cop killer. Despite the rage about Muslim immigrants and all their criminal ways, Mr Toothpaste is an immigrant himself (he calls himself a ‘citizen’ but is not) and performs all but one of the murders in this film. While some may approve of the rapists’ killings (or laying low the thugs he met on the bus, after later coming across them robbing someone for their mobile phone), nobody would agree that someone believing or repeating rape myths — myths widely believed in western society as well as among some immigrants — makes it acceptable to kill them. It is also not true that it is mostly migrants who do this, or that there is no legal redress when judges pass ridiculously lax sentences: in this country, two juvenile rapists had their community sentences increased to custodial ones only last week after a public outcry led to an appeal. In the Netherlands, two men in their 40s, one a former police officer, were acquitted of the rape of a 17-year-old girl because she did not resist or make her lack of consent obvious enough (that case is also going to appeal). In much of Europe where the Napoleonic Code prevails, even acquittals in lower courts can be overturned by higher courts, unlike in the UK. The closest incident I can think of to the opening murder scene (where a woman was senselessly murdered by a stranger in front of her toddler son) was the murder of Rachel Nickell in London in 1992, the perpetrator of which was a white man, Robert Napper. (Some might compare it to the murder of Iryna Zarutska on a North Carolina commuter train last year, which Uwe Boll has alluded to in interviews, but that happened after this was filmed.)
The scene of the police raid on Hammer’s character’s flat is also pretty ludicrous. In most developed countries the police, having gained access to a dwelling where a gunman was holding them at bay, would not just open fire when he failed to surrender at the first time of asking. There would be a siege, and there would be negotiations and only if he posed an immediate threat, by aiming a gun at them for example, would they fire at him. What happens in the street is different because a gunman in the street can injure bystanders (not to say that unjust killings do not happen in that situation). Some of the right-wing commentary supporting the film call the slain officers “corrupt police”, but in this case there was no corruption as such. They weren’t on the side of the rapists. They were trying to arrest an armed, violent serial killer.
The plot and the behaviour of the main character in Citizen Vigilante reflects Uwe Boll’s history as a maker of gamer films. It is a gamer’s fantasy, roaming around with a machine pistol, beating up baddies like a 21st century Terminator, shooting dead people who just get in the way: not only the actual criminals but their families and the police too. There is no room for subtlety: the police are not just acting in a system which doesn’t always deliver the degree of justice we might want, no: they’re baddies too and have to be blasted with the Uzi or incinerated. It is also extremely racist, with all the criminals being foreign in one way or another and mostly Middle Eastern. It plays up to assumptions about Arab society, the idea that Muslims newly arrived in the West (the family killed at the end are understood to be Syrian) will have never seen a woman not in an abaya and headscarf, at least; most of these countries have Christian populations, and Muslims who are not that religious, and there will be plenty of women dressed similarly to those in the West and, in some places, in bathing attire. This idea that they would never have seen a less than fully dressed woman before, or that this would produce uncontrollable sexual desire, is just not true.
The film is racist not because it posits that migrants do not have the right to rape, or should be punished when they do. It’s racist because it pretends that migrants, people perceived as ‘foreign’ (not including white Americans), are the only criminals of significance, that they are the only people who have objectionable attitudes to women, or who would excuse rape or blame the victims. (He does see two white men try to drug their dates, and swaps their drinks around so the men get the drug instead, but doesn’t shoot them.) Racist responses talk contemptuously of it being ‘dangerous’; the reason it is dangerous is because we have had more than one outbreak of violence in the UK since 2024 where organised mobs descended on towns as a result of mere rumours of crimes being committed by immigrants, on one occasion burning people out of their homes, running riot and threatening people because of the colour of their skin, and it is only a matter of time before these mobs kill someone and it might be someone completely innocent, and the rumour completely baseless. “Germany Banned Citizen Vigilante — are millions of men about to copy him?!”, gushes Nick Buckley MBE. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, eh? It’s all over YouTube and people are watching it for free, so Boll isn’t making any money out of it, but this could prove to be the 21st century’s Birth of a Nation (the 1915 film that inspired the revival of the Ku Klux Klan) which is a good reason to keep it out of cinemas.
