Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers.

Twenty-eight minutes into Citizen Vigilante, our avenging angel pauses mid-coitus in a brothel to scold the prostitute about the mold creeping up her wall. He is, you understand, a landlord first. The buildings came to him from a dead father, and he manages them with the same exactitude he brings to executing rapists and crooked judges. The moment is meant as nothing in particular, and it gives the whole game away. The man who has appointed himself the sword of justice cannot get through a paid encounter without stopping for a property inspection.

That man is Michael Sanders, an avenger with unexamined daddy issues, played by Armie Hammer, whose chilly control the film keeps mistaking for character. He is the work of director Uwe Boll, who operates in two registers: Some of his exploitation pictures have no point whatsoever (the Rampage trilogy stands as a monument to the form), and the rest rent out whatever resentment is loudest that season. Fifteen years ago that meant a working stiff swindled by the banks, gunning down bankers. In 2026 it reaches for the most combustible material on the shelf: a glassy, tailored American loose in a Europe that the film imagines as overrun, where migrants knife and rape almost as a matter of routine. That is the version the picture sells. The one it makes is stranger and emptier, because its hero has no wound, no soul, and no politics worth the name.

The genre Boll is ransacking knows what he never learns: Revenge needs a personal wound. Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974) unsettled Pauline Kael precisely because it flattered the audience’s bloodlust, yet the thing had a spine. Paul Kersey loses his wife and watches his daughter destroyed; the floor gives way beneath an ordinary life before he ever loads a gun. Even the cheapest avenger usually begins in grief, humiliation, or ruin. Sanders gets no such fall. No personal catastrophe sets him loose, and the killing comes first while the reasons straggle in behind it.

Exploitation can earn it. Pam Grier’s nurse in Coffy (1973) has someone to mourn and a fury you believe down to your shoes; the film is grind house to the marrow, and it commits. The mode is no disgrace. It only has to mean its violence, and Citizen Vigilante cannot, because it never settles on what the mayhem is for. It opens on an immigrant stabbing a young mother in the neck before her small son, a provocation that promises a revenge tract in block capitals. Then it loses the thread.

The wrath sprays outward: teenagers caught skipping a bus fare, a squad of policemen mowed down to the lilt of a samba, the badges belonging to no one’s idea of the enemy but his own. At one point, Sanders plays chicken with a motorist whose only sin is staying in his lane: “Human beings are such sheep,” he muses. “They will obey the law even when their lives are in danger,” and he runs the man into a ditch to burn. The keeper of the law murders a stranger for obeying it.

When he finally reaches real criminals — a migrant gang that raped a young woman and walked free — he gets there across more bodies than the rapists ever left, punishing one of the teenage attackers by killing his parents and sister. The self-styled steward of order is its busiest source of disorder.

What case survives arrives secondhand. Boll pipes it in through clumsy newscasts on an invented network and montages of Instagram “patriots” reading their lines like cue cards: This guy is taking out the trash; we need somebody like him back home. Paul Verhoeven built RoboCop out of precisely this device, and his mock broadcasts drew blood; Boll’s merely sit there, narrating the mood he would like you to catch. Sanders himself prefers the camera to the kill. Face pixelated, he uploads monologues to YouTube (“Everything that I do, I do for you”) and free-associates about Nietzsche with the confidence of a man who met the idea on a podcast. The cleverest beat in a witless script comes when he works a hospitalized rape victim, borrowing the vocabulary of victims’ advocacy to coax her into blessing his revenge before he steps out to take it. You half wonder whether the whole thing is meant as parody, and a sharper film might have been. This one is too incurious to know what it holds.

The waste that stings is Hammer. Whatever one makes of his fall from favor, he can still hold a frame, and in that hospital scene he nearly makes the rot persuasive. He needed a comeback; Citizen Vigilante extends his exile instead.

Its reactionary provocations will get it filed as a conservative film. It isn’t one. Cornering an Interpol officer, Sanders lays out the thesis: an “unfriendly takeover by the Islamist extremists and the blindsided woke left,” and only one remedy for it, “you end this, or we the people will end it ourselves.” That is a Jacobin fantasy wearing right-wing talking points as drag. The scandals the film invokes are real, of course. Europe has mismanaged immigration, courts do fail the innocent. But Sanders believes little is worth conserving beyond his rental units, and Boll is happy to give him the body count.

Citizen Vigilante was refused a certificate by Germany’s ratings board, effectively keeping it from wide release, and Boll has worn the verdict like a laurel. The board detected more menace in the picture than its maker could supply. He signs off with a dedication to Europe’s victims, betrayed by the courts, certain he has delivered something righteous. What he has made is a purge without the nerve of its own premise. For a movie about cleaning up the streets, Citizen Vigilante never works out which streets, whose law, or why. Sanders is simply a landlord with a gun, appointed inspector of a civilization, and the mold keeps climbing the wall.