A commentary on 'Citizen Vigilante', a controversial film by Uwe Boll

There has been a lot of talk lately about the latest film by German filmmaker Uwe Boll, which has been released online.

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The film stars Armie Hammer as a U.S. Army veteran who has taken over his late father's real estate business in Europe. Although the film doesn't explicitly state this, it is set in Croatia and has a very distinct political message related to immigration and crime, two issues that have been frequently featured in public debate for years. From what I've read, the film is inspired by the real case of the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl in Hamburg in 2020, in which the perpetrators were given ridiculously lenient sentences because the judge considered that "in the culture from which the perpetrators come, gang rape is a kind of identity-forming act, and they should not be held against their will." The case caused a great deal of controversy in Germany.

Uwe Boll paid for this film out of his own pocket. This feature film has garnered international attention because the Voluntary Self-Regulation of the Film Industry (FSK), a private film industry body that establishes age ratings for films shown in German cinemas, refused to issue a rating for this film, a common form of censorship that prevents works of extreme violence from reaching cinemas. After the ban was announced, Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, shared the film on his social network on June 25, although Boll has since deleted the post. The film can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube. Following its online success, Boll has already announced that there will be a sequel.

I must confess that watching an Uwe Boll film fills me with dread because he's an expert at making terrible movies, but I wanted to be able to form my own opinion about this feature film that's generating so much buzz on social media. It's worth noting that "Citizen Vigilante" isn't the first production to feature a lone citizen taking the law into his own hands. In the film industry, there are such famous examples as the two "Punisher" movies (a character from the Marvel universe) and "The Brave One" (2007), starring Jodie Foster. On television in 2022 we were able to see the excellent series "The Terminal List", starring Chris Pratt.

With "Citizen Vigilante," Uwe Boll takes a real problem (the rise in crime in many European cities, with many offenses committed by immigrants) and turns it into another title to add to his list of bad movies. It's rare for an action film (or at least what's supposed to be its genre) to be boring, but this one is, and then some. Boll fully embraces the protagonist's political discourse, who doesn't suffer the moral dilemmas of the Punisher or the mental health issues of the protagonist in "The Final List." Armie Hammer plays a man who speaks for the people and takes the law into his own hands without any remorse or moral conflict, but the reality is that there are plenty of them in the film.

In case anyone is planning to watch this film, I'm warning you that I'm about to give some spoilers. One of the biggest differences between this film and other vigilante productions is that Boll shows us a guy who doesn't hesitate to murder police officers and an innocent bystander, simply so the protagonist can prove his theory that people are like a herd. The most brutal scene comes when the protagonist murders the entire family of a teenage gang rape perpetrator because, when he spoke with them, they justified the rape based on the infamous mindset of many Islamic fundamentalists.

Without realizing it, in his eagerness to justify someone taking the law into their own hands (the director doesn't seem to want to add even the slightest nuance to the protagonist's discourse), Boll, unintentionally, ends up prompting us to ask ourselves a question: who watches the watchman? It's the big question that remains unanswered in all films of this genre. The legal and judicial system of many democratic countries is certainly flawed, and nowadays there are many unscrupulous and evil people taking advantage of the loopholes in that system, but that doesn't mean that the actions of a vigilante are preferable to that, especially if we're talking about a psychopath like the protagonist of this film.

If some people, who seem enthusiastic about this film, find the murders of innocents in it normal, as if that were an acceptable price to pay for anyone to decide to solve the problems of our laws and courts with gunfire, where will we draw the line? How long would it take for some to justify gunning down anyone who simply has a leftist discourse on immigration, or simply anyone who objects to the idea of ​​taking the law into their own hands? It must be said that the FSK has done this mediocre film a great favor by imposing this censorship. "Citizen Vigilante" deserved to become just another box office flop for its director. What the FSK has done is a clear Streisand effect, which is what happens when you try to censor something and, in doing so, actually give it more exposure. I'll leave you with the trailer.