The trouble with Citizen Vigilante
It’s not the politics. It’s the preaching.
‘Citizen Vigilante Is One of the Most Disturbing Movies I’ve Seen Lately.’ So runs the headline of a review in Slate of the controversial new movie written and directed by Uwe Boll. It stars Armie Hammer as Sanders, an American businessman based in an unspecified country in Europe who targets violent migrant criminals and those who have enabled them in the spheres of politics, law enforcement and the judiciary.
The reviewer for Slate is not the only one to brand the movie racist. Unsurprisingly, it has been accused of inciting violence against ethnic minority groups, and was effectively banned in Germany after the FSK (the country’s film classification body) refused to give it an age classification. This meant that it could not be released theatrically, distributed or advertised. Yet after Elon Musk posted the full movie on X for a limited period of two days, it was viewed many millions of times. The Streisand effect strikes again.
Whatever one’s views on the merits of Citizen Vigilante, Musk was right to promote it. I tend towards the view that any creative work that is banned ought to be amplified by those with the means, irrespective of its quality. In such circumstances, the principle must take precedence. I am reminded of a speech delivered by Stephen King in the 1990s to a group of school pupils on how best to respond to the banning of books:
‘Don’t get mad, get even. Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighbourhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest non-school library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.’
Citizen Vigilante belongs to a familiar tradition of the vigilante thriller, a subgenre of exploitation cinema, in which a lone figure takes revenge on society’s scum. One thinks immediately of Death Wish or The Equalizer, movies that revel in the moral ambiguity of citizens taking the law into their own hands. The character of Sanders in Citizen Vigilante does not deviate one jot from the archetype. There is a gratuitous sex scene with a prostitute, and he kills an innocent driver on the road simply to make a rhetorical point. He’s not a nice guy.
The popularity of the movie is easy to understand. It taps into a direct – and some would say ignoble – pleasure of popular storytelling: the thirst for poetic justice. With the two-tier systems of justice currently prevailing in many European countries (the UK included) many people are frustrated and angry at the failure of the law to reckon with criminals if they are from minority backgrounds. The case of the rape gangs in the north of England is perhaps the most obvious example, but there are many more.
None of this rescues Citizen Vigilante from being a terrible film. Hammer gives a strong performance, but the plot holes are cavernous and the script is ham-fisted. That said, its critics would do well to try to understand why it has struck a chord. It is the same reason why the 2005 thriller Hard Candy – a much worse film, in my view – was so appealing to those who are rightly furious that sex offenders have so often escaped justice. In that movie, a victim tracks down her paedophile abuser and spends most of the time torturing him both psychologically and physically. Similarly, I Spit On Your Grave (1978) depicts in disturbing detail the gang-rape of the lead character, who then systematically pursues each of her attackers and exacts bloody revenge.
Such films offer fantasies of retribution. The experience is close to what the ancient Greeks called catharsis: the arousal of pity and fear in tragedy which leads to a purgation of violent emotions. So the wife whose husband has left her for a younger woman can watch a production of Euripides’s Medea, relish her brutal reprisals (Medea sends her husband’s new lover a poisoned dress which tears away her flesh when she tries to remove it) and leave the theatre without any desire to commit similar acts of violence in real life. It’s a neat system.
Uwe Boll has said that Citizen Vigilante was inspired by a notorious case in Hamburg in 2016, when a group of teenagers raped a 14-year-old girl, only for the perpetrators to walk free with suspended sentences. The movie dramatises a near-identical case, culminating in Sanders holding the migrant Muslim family of one of the perpetrators hostage before forcing him to summon the other rapists and shooting them one by one.
Yet where Boll’s movie departs from the typical vigilante thriller is that its aim is not primarily cathartic. Like all revenge fantasies, it offers the audience the vicarious satisfaction of poetic justice, but it departs from this formula by leaning heavily into didacticism. Sanders is presented not simply as an avenger but as an exemplar, repeatedly arguing that the ruling class has abandoned ordinary citizens, leaving them with no alternative but to take matters into their own hands.
The film is interspersed with pixellated video recordings that Sanders broadcasts on the internet. At one point, he leans towards the camera and speaks aloud the message of the film: ‘I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself’. There are many words one could use to describe Boll’s filmmaking, but ‘subtle’ is not among them.
It is at this point that one can already hear the cries of ‘incitement!’ and ‘hate speech!’ from the pro-censorship lobby…
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