Citizen Vigilante, a new film by Uwe Boll, became a sensation after the German government tried to ban it. Elon Musk responded by making it briefly available for free on X, so the German ban had the usual effect of driving viewership.
I watched Citizen Vigilante on YouTube. As you probably know, the film is about a vigilante who, outraged by Europe’s immigration policies and lax criminal justice system, begins killing migrant criminals and lenient judges. The movie seems to be inspired by Death Wish, the Charles Bronson film that was a sensation in 1974. (My friend and colleague John Phelan wrote about Death Wish and its contemporary relevance here.)
Like Death Wish, Citizen Vigilante has been excoriated by critics and other respectable people. But it obviously strikes a chord: it currently has a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
My own reaction to the movie was mixed. First, some basics: it was shot in English and takes place in an unspecified European country that is said to be Croatia, although I don’t think this is clear in the film itself. The protagonist, Michael Sanders, is an American businessman. Sanders is played by Armie Hammer, who is descended from Armand Hammer, the Communist business tycoon. Hammer is making a comeback after “me too” accusations derailed his career.
When Citizen Vigilante begins, Sanders is already famous as a vigilante, although his identity is unknown, and he is already being pursued by Interpol. In the film’s bloodiest scene, he kills 20 or 30 Interpol officers who are trying to arrest him. By the film’s end, it seems that the head Interpol officer may be coming around to Sanders’ point of view, although this isn’t clear (to me, anyway). The film is very violent, although my threshold is low since I don’t generally watch violent movies. It is no worse, I suppose, than many contemporary thrillers, not to mention horror films.
Citizen Vigilante is not entirely without humor. In one very odd scene, Sanders visits a brothel that turns out to be in a building owned by one of his companies. In the midst of a romantic encounter, Sanders pauses because he notices mold on the wall near the ceiling of the room where the encounter takes place. He suspends erotic action long enough to scold the prostitute for not seeing that windows are opened in the upstairs room where clients shower. The encounter is then resumed. I assume the scene was included to get a little nudity into the movie, and that any humor was unintended. But perhaps not.
To the extent that the point of the film is that 1) Western European immigration policies have been a disaster, and 2) some European law enforcement systems have failed to protect their indigenous populations against violence by immigrants, it is indisputably correct. So fulmination against the film by the authorities is likely to merely drive the point home.
Is there a danger that movies like Death Wish and Citizen Vigilante will cause civilians to take justice into their own hands? Not much, I should think, especially in Europe where few civilians are armed. More likely, it will add fuel to demands in countries like the U.K. and Germany that law enforcement and the judiciary crack down on immigrant crime, and that central governments reverse their open-door mass immigration policies. That can only be good.
Mass third-world immigration has become the issue that, more than any other, defines the future of Western European democracy. Most people don’t like it, but European elites don’t like their people, and irreversible demographic change is the hill they are determined to die on, voters be damned. How this battle plays out will go a long way toward determining the future of democracy in Europe.
UPDATE: I should have included the film’s trailer:
