‘Citizen Vigilante’ Is The Latest Product Of The Culture Of Petulance

In the movie Citizen Vigilante, the latest Uwe Boll provocation that’s gaining attention from the far-right side of the internet, Armie Hammer plays Michael Sanders, an American vigilante righting the wrongs of Europe’s woke-and-broken criminal justice system. Why an American has deemed himself worthy of this task, let’s not ask that question … or too many others. When he’s not out patrolling the streets, Sanders makes his living as a landlord. One sequence of scenes shows Sanders in one moment mounting a one-man assault on an entire police force, and in the next he’s having a meeting with the staff of his real estate business to get a rundown on his properties. There’s something so rich about making the hero/antihero of your vigilante fantasy not just a murderous do-gooder, but a landlord to boot. I could forgive, and maybe get into, Sanders’s gratuitous killing, but I cannot abide landlording. Even the creators of Batman knew to make the source of his wealth vague enough to not get in the way of the fantasy.

Maybe it is irresponsible of me to describe Citizen Vigilante as a “fantasy.” I don’t know that that’s totally what is going on here. The movie tells the story of an American military expat (maybe? unclear?) living in “Europe” (apparently Croatia?) who, in between his landlord duties, decides to take the law into his hands after watching the city he has immigrated to fall into disarray at the hands of the wrong kinds of migrants.

Citizen Vigilante opens with a nice blonde woman taking her adorable white child to the grocery store. Unfortunately, her walk through this dangerously sunny neighborhood takes her past a sketchy building, which you know is sketchy because it has some graffiti on it. As she passes, a knife-wielding black migrant gruesomely stabs her in the neck, then runs away while making ooga booga sounds. We know this particular black stabber is a migrant because the next scene features a news segment which helpfully points out the killer’s immigration status, amongst other bits of exposition. The newscaster then posits that, with all this migrant-fueled crime, what might be needed is a mysterious vigilante to come around offering the kind of justice that the legal system cannot. You know, like how they typically talk on the news. This opening is meant to set a scary and upsetting tone, which it maybe would have if it weren’t all so shoddily made, devoid of tension or pacing or suspense.