It’s a hit, man: Armie Hammer as ‘Citizen Vigilante’.
CITIZEN VIGILANTE *1/2 (88 minutes)
The controversy that has been swirling around Uwe Boll’s low-budget movie since it was refused classification in Germany – effectively banning it – suggests that Citizen Vigilante is an incendiary, hot-button polemic tapping into a tide of resentment about a polarizing issue.
And it is – but not because it’s any good.
In his first acting role in five years, Armie Hammer (The Social Network) plays Sanders, an American businessman visiting Croatia to oversee his late father’s property empire. (Well, it was filmed in Croatia. The actual country is never identified.)
In between stern discussions about overdue rent payments, repairs, ceiling mould and visits to prostitutes Sanders conducts a one-man crusade targeting bad migrants who stab, rape and evade bus fares.
Despite its tautological title – vigilantes are, by definition, citizens – and the misleading impression created by all the YouTube clips, Sanders does not actually qualify as a vigilante, at least not according to movie lore.
Sanders lacks the moral clarity and stalwart righteousness demanded by the vigilante archetype. Hence, any comparisons to such iconic vigilante films as 1974’s Death Wish are highly dubious.
To ensure crucial audience alliance, a true movie vigilante must establish water-tight motivation against a target before acting, a requirement religiously observed in Dexter. Emotion and anger are not enough.
Sanders simply lacks precision in his spree, often killing people on sight because they’ve walked through a door.
He also bears a curious, contradictory attitude towards the pursuing police officers.
While acknowledging how they’re just doing their job, he’s perfectly happy to lay waste to them, even though he has non-lethal means available.
Such sloppiness flatly negates any claim that Sanders is an avenging angel doing the work the system has failed to do in dealing with violent immigrants.
Rather, he’s a murderer with shallow pretense to a code, a hypocrisy made clear by the manner he deals with a lenient judge.
None of these inconsistencies, however, factor into the way Citizen Vigilante has been embraced.
Millions regard it as giving voice to their frustrations about the mass-immigration policies considered responsible for the deterioration of European identity. This is despite apparent attempts to hamper the film’s release.
Indeed, Citizen Vigilante is far more interesting as a demonstration of the Streisand Effect, where an attempt to keep something from public view achieves the precise opposite by drawing attention to it.
Once word got out about the film’s ban in Germany, clips quickly circulated online highlighting the film’s stance against immigrants who commit crime.
As the head of steam built, the film received the endorsement of Elon Musk, who put the film up on his X feed for all to see, free, for 48 hours. He has 240 million followers.
So, too, did writer/director/producer Uwe Boll, who supplemented the move with videos thanking everyone for their support and promising a sequel, provided he recoups the money he put up to make the film.
Predictably, the entire film has also popped up on several YouTube channels with no paywall and without a viewing window.
Yet still it’s topped the charts on Amazon Prime and AppleTV (though not in Australia where the film is not streaming).
Perhaps most important is how all this exposure has occurred outside the traditional movie distribution model, which has been showing cracks for a while.
Put bluntly, any filmmaker who wants their film seen can side-step the usual mechanism and simply upload it.
They might need to absorb the upfront cost of doing so in the hope of a deferred payday, but if the message matters so much there’s nothing stopping them from reaching a potentially huge audience – as has happened here.
The film’s rapidly swelling profile also pulls focus on the rapidly shrinking relevance of mainstream media, with most major mastheads ignoring the film.
Once upon a time such shunning would have mattered. Now it’s a punchline.
#