Citizen Vigilante: don't bother

www.americanthinker.com

Rotten Tomatoes is a movie-rating site where the public often strongly disagrees with movie critics. Such is the case with German director and writer Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante. Its RT score stands at 94%. The movie is controversial, perhaps largely for two reasons: Germany banned it, and Elon Musk briefly made it universally available on X. On one hand, people tend to want whatever government bans, and on the other, Democrats and their allies reflexively oppose anything associated with Musk, except money. They still like that, especially if they can get if from others like Musk.

Graphic: X Post

The movie stars only two actors Americans might recognize: Arme Hammer, rebuilding a movie career derailed by the “believe all women” hysteria, and Costas Mandylor. Hammer plays the protagonist and vigilante, Michael Sanders. Mandylor plays Interpol Chief Henry. The only other actor with a little screen time is Desiree Georgietti, who plays Elsa, a badly beaten victim of immigrant crime—presumably rape; the movie doesn’t say—who briefly moans in pain and utters very little dialogue from a hospital bed in two brief scenes. Hammer has a single, blank facial expression. It’s hard to catch him blinking. Mandylor is no better.

There is no character development.

The movie has a theme: Sanders will kill immigrant criminals because the system won’t do it until Europeans learn to do it themselves. It does not have a plot. There is no internal or external conflict Sanders must overcome.

The movie also has, at best, poor production values. The lighting, sound, music, cinematography, props, sets, editing, and everything that goes into making a good movie are bottom-of-the-barrel. It might not have been filmed with an iPhone. The dialogue is stilted and odd, perhaps due to translation issues from German to English.

Particularly glaring is the editing. The movie jumps back and forth in time, usually with unnecessarily long black-screen transitions to no effect, and there is no consistent narrative thread. Sanders is a vigilante who kills immigrant—usually Muslim—violent rapists and murderers, except he also kills about 20 SWAT cops and some innocents in a car to make a point to a corrupt, unconscious judge he has injected with heroin, and who he is driving to the countryside to kill by fake suicide any cop would recognize as staged.

Sanders, a brilliant vigilante the police can’t identify or catch, is amazingly incompetent. He makes no effort to hide his identity, doesn’t wear gloves, leaves fingerprints and DNA everywhere, virtually always wears the same clothing, constantly drinks in bars, visits crime victims and frequents prostitutes, people not known for their discretion.

He produces social media posts with his face and voice disguised, but so poorly done that competent police could tell a great deal about him from his pixelated image alone.

A substantial portion of the movie consists of scenes of Sanders walking somewhere or police armored vehicles driving somewhere for no apparent reason. And that’s a major problem with the movie: it’s almost entirely stitched together with confusing scenes, some repeated, others having no apparent connection with what came before or after. A prostitution scene makes no narrative sense and tells us nothing about Sanders.

In another scene, Sanders and Henry, who don’t know each other, are coincidentally drinking alone in the same bar. Sanders sees two rapists dose their date’s drinks while they’re in the bathroom. He manages to switch the drinks, the rapists pass out, he tells the girls to go home, and after he leaves, Henry takes his glass, presumably to test it for prints and DNA.

Soon but not immediately, police armored vehicles are rolling to a villa where Sanders has set up an armored bunker with two AKs in firing ports inside an empty room. There is no visual or dialogue connection between Henry’s taking the glass and discovering Sanders’ identity or location, nor any indication of how Sanders knew they were coming. The SWAT team enters, Sanders warns them, and instead of retreating as sane cops would, they shoot, and Sanders kills them in slow, blood-spurting, motion.

Graphic: X Post

Why the 94% approval? The movie resonates with Europeans and Americans alarmed by unrestrained immigration and immigrant crime, such as the 250,000 English girls and women raped. It does it clumsily, but such sentiments are largely absent from contemporary cinema.

The movie ends with a phone call from Sanders to Henry, who is burned and broken and in the hospital after a boobytrap Sanders left blows him and the remaining SWAT team up. He gives Henry his thematic message. Henry may or may not buy it, and the movie goes to the credits.

Because there is no plot, nothing is resolved, and we are left to argue the issues politicians ignore.

Some movies aren’t good art, but they are good entertainment. Citizen Vigilante isn’t either. It’s a Walmart bargain bin choice for a long weekend when one is terminally bored.

Become a subscriber and get our weekly Friday newsletter with unique content from our editors. These essays alone are worth the cost of the subscription.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.