Uwe Boll's 'Citizen Vigilante': A New Masterpiece of Incompetence That Glorifies Killing Immigrants

We've known for decades that Uwe Boll is a bad director. But his latest film, 'Citizen Vigilante,' a deliberately provocative anti-immigrant revenge action movie, manages to be so cinematically inept that it's practically an achievement in itself, even if you set aside its racism, misogyny, and dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants. John Walker's review for Kotaku sums it up in one word: disaster.

The film's supposed plot is simple: Armie Hammer plays Sanders, who sets out on a mission to avenge women killed in Europe by "undocumented immigrants." But 'Citizen Vigilante' can't even hold up that skeleton of a premise; it's little more than a cheap string of scenes barely stitched together. After a woman is stabbed in the throat on the street in the opening, almost nothing happens for the next 40 minutes. A mock news broadcast tells us a serial killer is being pursued; then we watch the police chief and his heavily armed team take long walks, along with Sanders's dull dialogue with random strangers.

Sanders lecturing three young men on a bus who didn't pay their fare about the economic consequences of fare evasion, and preaching to a woman at a brothel about the importance of opening a window after a shower because of a mold smell — these are perhaps the film's two strangest scenes. The first murder doesn't happen until the 45-minute mark, and it consists entirely of a group of cops, simply doing their jobs, being slaughtered. By the 76-minute mark, the "immigrant killer" still hasn't killed a single immigrant. Then, visiting a Muslim family, Sanders shoots everyone — mother, father, and child included — after a long sermon about their "archaic value system."

The film is edited so badly that at times the same moment is accidentally shown twice from two different angles, with two different pieces of music overlapping. What Hammer is doing that passes for acting amounts to little more than a mechanical baritone impression. In the end, 'Citizen Vigilante' is an abomination that slaps both its intended audience (it doesn't kill a single immigrant!) and ordinary viewers alike — 75 minutes of tedium combined with 10 minutes of repulsive racism. It's understandable that Germany's ratings board denied the film certification; even Elon Musk sharing it for free on X for 48 hours couldn't win it a larger audience.