Citizen Vigilante: Catharsis and Reminder
by Joakim Andersen
Uwe Boll does not have an entirely spotless reputation as a filmmaker. In fact, he is often described as one of the worst in his field, and has achieved a notorious cult status. This judgement is not entirely fair, though: apart from his video game adaptations, Boll has also made entertaining films such as Postal and Assault on Wall Street.
His persona is populist in several respects, as he both swears and challenges critics to boxing matches. One of them, incidentally, described him as an “insane, two-fisted rogue, and a shockingly honest one at that, someone who absolutely adores film, knows its history and truly lives for what he does.”
Here, one can sense why Boll has continued to make films for decades despite the criticism, and how he has been able to do so. Beyond stiff dialogue and limited budgets, the German producer often displays a love for the medium and a vision that is lacking among the post-managerial-revolution producer class of Hollywood.
An obvious example of this is Boll’s latest film, the much-discussed Citizen Vigilante, starring Armie Hammer as Michael Sanders. The character bears similarities to Bruce Wayne: he is a financially independent American with a military background who ends up in a crime-ravaged Europe. The establishment refuses to deal with rape and other violations of the law, even refusing to acknowledge the connection to immigration policy. At the same time, the judiciary is portrayed as understanding toward the perpetrators but not toward the victims (a highly publicized gang rape that allegedly resulted in remarkably low sentences is said to have been the background for Boll’s film).
In a non-linear fashion, the film follows Sanders’ violent pursuit of justice; he punishes both the perpetrators and the judges who released them among potential new victims. Citizen Vigilante is difficult to classify. In terms of genre, it’s an action film in the same tradition as Death Wish and Taken. At the same time, it has strong elements of propaganda film and wish fulfilment, the latter made obvious not least in the protagonist’s lengthy speeches about crime and punishment.
The synthesis of these genres is not entirely unproblematic: it is a poor action film insofar as, in a propaganda film, there is no need to worry about the protagonist being killed. But it is also a poor propaganda film insofar as Boll, in a nod to the action format, gives the protagonist a certain moral ambiguity.
A charitable interpretation would be that with Citizen Vigilante he is creating something entirely novel, something related to the conscious interventions of the Situationists and other artistic avant-gardes, but this time with populist rather than communist undertones. If that is the idea, then it is a quality this film shares with Boll’s older work Assault on Wall Street, although the latter has clearer mythical undertones.
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Rest assured, Citizen Vigilante does not lack artistic aspects, even if the limited budget likely made the project more difficult. Hammer portrays the cold, psychologically abnormal even, Sanders in an exemplary manner, while Boll, due to limitations of space, can only hint at an almost Freudian complex built around the masculine and feminine, the Father and the Mother (cf. the opening scene). Viewed with the Father as a mythical figure at its core, it is an interesting film, regardless of whether we consider the absent father, the father as an authority figure, or the father-in spe project that Hammer portrays. Both the collective of men and the Establishment as a symbolic authority figure have failed the people of Europe, particularly women and children, and Boll/Sanders is acting in order to “teach them how to defend themselves.”
Boll’s film is strongly masculine-coded, and from this fact naturally follows an equally strong concern for women and children. This may incidentally explain why he lets the camera linger on the police officers the protagonist is forced to kill; it can just as easily be interpreted as rooted in a masculine sense of tragedy as in a more abstract “moral dilemma.”
All that said, Citizen Vigilante has not attracted attention primarily due to its artistic qualities or shortcomings; rather, it is its breach of the unspoken rules governing filmmaking that has provoked reactions. The vigilante genre has ancient roots; think only of the Vehmic courts, the Ku Klux Klan, Hermann Löns’ Der Wehrwolf, Batman, and others. It is normally regarded with a degree of suspicion and a certain anti-plebeian contempt. Films containing violence directed at politically, religiously, or ethnically disliked groups are nothing new either (cf. Inglourious Basterds, etc.).
What Boll does is break with the rules of representation: he not only portrays several of the rapists as immigrants, but also depicts justified violence against non-white people. In Western society, these are not considered objectionable groups, but rather symbolically valued victim groups. Added to this are the protagonist’s verbal and physical attacks on representatives of the judiciary and the Establishment. Doing any of this on film is taboo, but until now it has been an unspoken taboo.
When violence against whites or Christians has been portrayed with pleasure, even lust, in various films, the politically correct cineast and apologist has always been able to dismiss critics by saying they were overreacting: “it’s only a film.” The reactions to Citizen Vigilante show that it was not quite so simple; the one-directional violence in mainstream movies was always a part of its reward system. The principles of art — that it “should provoke” or it ”should be able to ask questions” — cease to apply when the artist has the wrong opinions. “Art should not be interpreted literally” when it concerns rap lyrics, but Boll “openly promotes the graphic, brutal and wholesale slaughter of Muslim immigrants,” to quote one critic. This is despite the fact that the film is not really “racist”: Sanders kills both black and white people and expresses a worldview containing elements of both counter-jihadism and libertarianism (“this is an unfriendly takeover by the Islamist extremists and the blindsided woke left. And if this takeover is successful, it’ll destroy the democracy you say you love. All the freedom, everything you enjoy and stand for”). However, the fact that the protagonist tells the family of a rapist that “I don’t think it was the good ones that got out of your country, I think it was the bad ones,” may not be entirely compatible with liberal sensibilities.
Because of all this, the film has been met with attempts at censorship, such as the German decision not to grant it an age rating. At the same time, it has gained a large audience in part because Elon Musk has made it available for free on X for a limited time.
Boll has succeeded in drawing attention to themes such as crime and immigration; it is less likely that audiences will be inspired by the protagonist’s methods, and that is probably not the producer’s intention either. Breaking hated and illegitimate taboos is an achievement in itself, and can offer a temporary feeling of freedom — a feeling that, incidentally, resembles something that has been lost.
An interesting question is to what extent the film will lead to more creations in the same vein, or whether Hollywood is now changing sides. This is unlikely, given that Boll, for better or worse, is still Boll: an outsider in this context. Even so, the popularity of Citizen Vigilante will probably not pass Hollywood by entirely; even if it is likely to be done discreetly, there may be certain adjustments to audience preferences in the future.
Regardless, the film’s value is primarily as a “happening” and an intervention. It offers a moment of catharsis, a moment where wrongdoers are actually punished, and serves as a reminder that many people do desire justice.
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