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The final scene of Uwe Boll’s controversial new film Citizen Vigilante, in which a self-appointed avenger played by Armie Hammer executes an entire family of Syrian migrants—father, mother, brother, sister—in their apartment, is going viral on X in all the wrong places. The movie follows Sanders (Hammer), an American veteran visiting an unnamed European city on business, who’s become a Death Wish–esque folk hero. He kills this family because the teenage son was part of a gang of migrant kids that raped a local girl and escaped punishment because the judge on their case was overly sympathetic to their situation. (Earlier in the film, Sanders murdered that judge, too.)
The apartment scene is a horror show, borderline snuff, a bloody home invasion mixed with a smug lecture on politics. The parents, Sanders tells them, deserve death because they supported their son; the sister deserves death because she posted on social media that the victim deserved it. In a monotone Hammer maintains throughout the movie, Sanders asks the father, “Are these the values you’re teaching your children?”
“I teach them values from the Quran and values from our family,” the father answers, to which Sanders responds: “Do you know what I think? I don’t think it was the good ones that got out of your country—I think it was the bad ones.” Cue the rain of silenced gunshots, and the rejoicing posts on X.
Citizen Vigilante is one of the most disturbing movies I’ve seen in recent memory, for its reception as much as its content. Boll, a director with decades of experience making violent B-movies that are both slapdash and outré, has been a troll longer than some trolls on X have drawn breath. But even he couldn’t have predicted how perfectly Citizen Vigilante, released last week, would hit the zeitgeist for X-posting right-wingers who are single-issue agitators on the subject of migration. Islamophobic (and antisemitic) violence is on an uptick in the U.K. And on June 9, in Belfast, after a stabbing was caught on camera and shared on social media, rioters targeted immigrants’ homes and set fire to property across the city. The victim of the stabbing was Irish; the alleged perpetrator, who’s been arrested but not convicted, is an asylum-seeker from Sudan. In the same month he became the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk cheered on the rioters, and then refused to apologize for it: “Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what’s making people angry, not ‘social media’!” This was a rant that could have come right out of Sanders’ mouth.
Some anti-migrant film fans who actually watch Citizen Vigilante may find themselves a little underwhelmed by how few asylum-seekers die in the film—the much-retweeted climactic sequence set in the family’s apartment is the most violent and racist scene by far. In the rest of the movie, Sanders actually mostly kills cops, a detail that turns off some right-wing viewers, while others justify it by calling the police “traitors” for working for the System. Boll has now positioned the film online as a brave act of political speech. There are a few bits of lore around the production that are helping. Boll recruited the canceled Hammer for the role via email in 2024. (“I’m pretty sure I cried,” Hammer told the Hollywood Reporter, saying it was the first offer for acting work he’d had in five years.) The movie was initially titled The Dark Knight, a provocation apparently rescinded after Warner Bros. objected. And was Citizen Vigilante really “banned” in Germany out of censorship, as Boll claimed, after it was left unrated, which means it can’t be exhibited in the country? Variety reached out to the German ratings agency FSK for comment, but didn’t hear back. Either way, the very idea of a ban lent credence to the concept that Citizen Vigilante was a truth-telling film, something, at long last, from outside the Hollywood hive mind.
People best remember Boll for a string of questionable and unprofitable film adaptations of video games, but “man slowly sours on society, then suddenly gets violent” is a plot that he has used in movies made from original scripts dating way back to 1994’s Amoklauf, about an unnamed man dreaming of and then executing escalating violence until he stages a mass shooting. “I’ve always loved movies that are dark and strange,” Boll said in an interview about that film. This track record has made for some strange bedfellows among Boll watchers. In 2013, Vicky Osterweil wrote an essay in the New Inquiry arguing for Boll as a kind of an accidental vox populi after the release of his 2013 movie Assault on Wall Street, which follows a family wrecked by the financial crisis as the husband gets slowly radicalized and proceeds to murder a string of bankers. Boll, Osterweil points out, was one of the only directors at the time to have made multiple movies about American mass shootings, including Heart of America (2002, about a school shooting) and Rampage (2009, about a young man shooting up his town from inside a handmade welded suit of armor, a device echoed in a welded fortress Sanders hides inside while he kills piles of cops midway through Citizen Vigilante). “It’s almost absurdly neat that the man dubbed ‘the worst director alive’ is the only director taking the events the media treats as the country’s worst tragedies seriously,” Osterweil wrote.
Nor is Citizen Vigilante the first movie Boll has made about migration. Run (2025) follows a boat of African refugees from landfall in an unnamed town in Italy through a couple of uneasy days of encounters with the people who live in the town. On X this week, Boll shared a link to Run, recommending it to those who like Citizen Vigilante, which to me is strong evidence that his new alliance with the Muskian right-wing agitators on X is either ill-informed or rooted in self-aware advantage-taking. There’s no way the same people who cheered on Armie Hammer shooting a teenage girl for her social media posts are going to like this movie. Run does Boll-ishly culminate in a climax of horrifying violence. But, unlike the single-minded Citizen Vigilante, Run personifies a few migrants, including Ismael, a friendly and sincere man played by Barkhad Abdi (the BAFTA-winning actor who delivers the famous “I’m the captain now” line in Captain Phillips), and Selena (Hannah Balogun), a beautiful and desperate young pregnant woman taken under the wing of an American tourist, Anna (Amanda Plummer), who has real empathy for the African migrants. The story peaks in misplaced vigilantism: One of a trio of bitter, migrant-hating American expats interferes in a tense hostage situation, and their trigger-happy actions eventually culminate in many deaths, of migrants and Italians alike.
Watching Run puts Citizen Vigilante in a different light. Sanders, in that clipped climax that’s ruling X right now, may seem impressive if you agree with his murderous politics, but in the movie as a whole, he displays significant kinship with Run’s three foolish Americans. He’s totally off the rails, pursuing a solution he’s made up to a bad situation unfolding in a country that’s not his own. Sanders is good at guns and looking intense doing landmine presses, all of which puts him in the category of “movie badass.” But he’s also irrational, a stickler for order who pulls out in the middle of an encounter with a sex worker to lament the black mold growing on her ceiling, lectures teens on a bus about how not paying for bananas in grocery stores makes everything more expensive, and, meeting a subordinate who works for his company, shows himself to be an utterly merciless landlord who would, if he legally could, evict tenants after just one month of nonpayment. But, in another scene, as he argues that most people are sheep who would rather die than break the law, he drives full-speed in the wrong lane toward another car, which rolls off the road and explodes in a fireball. He’s killed innocent civilians, to make a point—and the point makes little sense. Should we follow the rules, or shouldn’t we? As much as right-wing trolls may hail Sanders as a hero, I think he is also obviously meant to scan as a bit of a freak, kin to other Boll shooters in past movies: 25 percent canary in a coal mine, 75 percent cooked in the head.
I have to conclude, then, that Citizen Vigilante—the one clip and its director’s self-interested hype aside—doesn’t quite do what those right-wingers want it to do. At least one self-described “former eurocrat turned proud patriot” posting on X saw this, too: “Sold as the white guy fantasy for people sick of immigration, crime and treason. Actually paints those same Europeans as degenerate, delusional, hypocritical, cruel and self-righteous psychopaths who can’t tell fact from fiction, innocent from guilty, or have any sense of proportion.” This user got roasted for it in the replies, because most people who hate migrants seem to want to believe that Uwe Boll has “shifted” the culture away from “woke” directors like Christopher Nolan. But that doesn’t make it any less true.
What we are left with is a filmmaker who isn’t quite a right-wing hack, but who certainly doesn’t appear to be afraid to slyly work with that crowd for the sake of getting more attention. In 2008, the comedian and actor Dave Foley, who was in Boll’s universally derided Postal (2007), told the New York Times that he thought of Boll as being “like a quintessential German intellectual artist who has almost taken film arbitrarily as the medium he’s going to work in. The art form is, almost, in being hated. … It’s his relationship with the audience that is his creation, his relationship with the critics, more than the movies.”
Almost 20 years later, this “art form” is common practice among people who manipulate online sentiment for a living, and Boll is playing in a dangerous sandbox. Another user on X asked him if there was any truth to the hearsay that Boll used to make left-wing, anti-white films before Citizen Vigilante, to which the director replied with a perfect bit of anti-woke rhetoric that hides more than it shows: “The people who say that are mentally retarded.” Continuing the natural evolution of the release cycle he’s courted with this movie, Boll then went on right-wing media star Jack Posobiec’s podcast, for an interview that Elon Musk praised. In a perfect coda, as of today, Citizen Vigilante in its entirety is now available to watch for free on X. “The movie Hollywood doesn’t want you to see,” reads the accompanying text, evoking shades of conspiracy and censorship. Uwe Boll has a whole new audience—if he can keep it.
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