Hollywood attempts to create a consensus condemning the movie, as it faces a media blackout.
Accusing Citizen Vigilante, Uwe Boll’s flash point movie, of bad taste — or bad politics — is just film-culture hysteria. Spot the source in the hit piece published by the show-business trade paper Variety on June 19. Instead of criticism, it attempts to create a consensus of received opinion — in this case on the merits of Boll’s trite, grim filmmaking, his canceled star Armie Hammer, and on the film’s controversial stance on immigration, government, and globalism.
Hollywood’s prevailing leftist sentiment is aghast at the Me Too desperation of Michael Sanders (played by Hammer), an American military veteran who inherits real estate in the film’s dystopic setting — “EUROPE,” overrun with feral immigrant scofflaws, housing frauds, prostitutes, and gang rapists. The industry committed to communist-token Mayor Karen Bass has to object to Boll’s vision of what has gone wrong with Western liberal policies that invite Muslim immigrants, but it lacks the principles to mount an honest artistic counterpoint.
Dismissing Citizen Vigilante is not the same as critiquing it, which Variety writer Todd Gilchrist proves when he goes ad hominem: “Boll, a cinematic embarrassment since the early 2000s, here delivers a violent, incoherent, morally bankrupt slice of exploitation.” Variety ought to know that all Hollywood is exploitation, so Gilchrist simply objects, for reasons that his Variety bosses dictate, that Boll operates in the vigilante genre, popular from Death Wish to The Equalizer, the Taken franchise, and Joker. Gilchrist’s anger and personal attacks reveal insupportable political outrage.
As discussion of Citizen Vigilante lights up social media, it’s important to remember that Boll initially titled the film The Dark Knight, emulating Christopher Nolan’s Batman blockbuster, as if parodying Hollywood status quo nihilism. In a nonlinear origin scene out of Batman, a boy witnesses his mother killed by an immigrant thug, epitomizing threat to the West and inspiring Sanders to become a vigilante who aims to thwart social decay.
Boll’s action trash is an unapologetic screed — Hammer’s stern vocals and one-dimensional stoicism parody Michael Fassbender as a social justice warrior in David Fincher’s The Killer. The film’s English-language dialogue assumes Western (American) consciousness — in banning Citizen Vigilante, Germany rejects the movie’s gallows comedy about European civilization being at stake. It contrasts Disclosure Day to show TV anchors broadcasting Sanders’s PSAs and revenge killings, then speaking the unspeakable: “Our current system is failing to protect our citizens. This raises critical questions. If the risks associated with migration outweighs the benefits, if migrants are contributing more to social cost than economic gains, then it might be time to reevaluate our migration policies.”
Variety leads Hollywood’s charge against Citizen Vigilante and Sanders’s (and Boll’s) manipulation of Fake News partisanship. This film could never be made in the U.S. Here, a mainstream TV network, CBS, offered dramatic shows during the Biden era that promoted deep state institutions — the FBI and CIA. Instead, Sanders manipulates the media to broadcast, “Here’s only one option: You end this, or we the people will end it ourselves.”
The violence depicted in Citizen Vigilante is against the immigrant criminals and the Interpol agents as well as immigration policy: “The archaic value system and your commitment to religion over democracy and over anything else including the rule of law.” It’s so extreme that gore fans might consider it comic. But Boll is not a master satirist like Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor or a moralist like S. Craig Zahler. The film does an end around Hollywood propaganda, taking advantage of popular frustration. Sanders announces on TV, “I can’t sit here and watch you exist in a state of sleep paralysis anymore. . . . You are all being used. . . . Every soldier who has gone off to war has been played.” Imagine George Stephanopoulos or Margaret Brennan being so honest.
Boll’s straight-faced satire primarily goes against the unquestioned partisanship of anti-Western fare such as One Battle After Another. Variety even published an Oscar-seasons article declaring in a headline that “No, One Battle After Another Is Not a ‘Left-Wing’ Movie.” Fact is, OBAA’s title rephrased the communist plaudit A Luta Continua, signaling to young communists and hipster Bolsheviks the same way that Joker encouraged future Mangione-lovers. How can Citizen Vigilante be “controversial” when OBAA, its opposite number, avoided the “controversial” label by dint of mainstream media’s rubber-stamping its leftist politics? Podcaster Lauren Chen got it right when telling Boll, “I haven’t seen so much furor over the crimes that are actually happening [committed by immigrants in the West] as there is over the film. You’re not saying anything controversial.”
Citizen Vigilante provokes discussion that leftist Hollywood media suppress. Sanders victimizes a family harboring the rape gang, telling them, “I think you brought with you your archaic value system and your commitment to religion over democracy and over anything else, including the rule of law.” Harsh words for a cheap film that nonetheless champions free speech — as indicated by Elon Musk when he posted free viewings of Citizen Vigilante for 48 hours to counter the rampant film-festival-circuit programming for open-border globalist propaganda. Despite the movie’s popularity on social media, the media blackout of Citizen Vigilante (the New York Times has not reviewed it) ignores, as always, the populism that Boll has ignited but that Hollywood no longer acknowledges. Citizen Vigilante proves this truth simply by putting up a fight.
