Armie Hammer returns in Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante, a bloodthirsty revenge film which cannibalises elements from Death Wish, Harry Brown and Death Sentence to blow its own dog whistle.
Hammer, the once-promising star of Free Fire, The Man From U.N.C.L.E and Call Me By Your Name found his career derailed after allegations of psychological, emotional, and physical abuse. Since then, he’s largely disappeared from the public eye, presumably biding his time for a comeback, like Kevin Spacey, James Franco and Mel Gibson before him.
Five years later and he’s made good on that threat, headlining the latest low-budget action picture from writer and director Uwe Boll. Far from a triumphant rebuttal to those who’d tried to cancel him, Hammer is instead subjected to further humiliation.
In it, he plays American landlord Michael Sanders, who’s living a double-life in a crime-ridden European city. The wealthy inheritor of his father’s real estate business, he spends his spare time (and money) murdering immigrant criminals and rapists.
As Sanders’ revenge mission begins to go viral, he’s hunted by Interpol agent Henry (Costas Mandylor – somehow the best actor in this thing), who’s pledged to bring the so-called Vigilante Citizen in for his crimes.
Boll wears his intentions on his sleeve, playing up the film’s sensationalist overtones with all the subtlety you’d expect from the director of House of the Dead, Postal and, uh, Auschwitz. Those hoping to see a sense of improvement from the director after over two decades in the game will find little here; it’s as clumsily written and flatly directed as anything he’s ever done.
Hammer, who once demonstrated genuine charisma and charm in his previous work, skulks along with a dead-eyed expression, as though he knows the film is beneath him. Better the pouting than when he opens his mouth though, where he’s forced to deliver lines like “this is an unfriendly takeover by the Islamist extremists and the blindsided woke left” with a straight face.
With Sanders confronting a gang of fare-dodging youths on the bus, or menacing hospital-bound Henry, Boll’s script can best be described as the Shower Arguments of a man who’s spent too much time watching GB or Fox News. By the time Sanders attacks the same youths in a park, Citizen Vigilante resembles Ricky Gervais beating up muggers in After Life more than it does Death Wish.
Still, much of the immigrant murdering is constrained to the film’s last fifteen minutes, likely to keep the budget as low as it was. Without this sequence, it’d have been unremarkably bad. With it, Citizen Vigilante becomes precisely what it had intended to be – a cynical headline grabber, pandering to the worst kind of people to further its creator’s own sense of infamy.
“This film is dedicated to the thousand s of rape and murder victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system,” reads the film’s solemn closing statement. If that’s true, then Citizen Vigilante has done every one of them a disservice.
Like the revenge movies of the 1970s, it’s a work of exploitation – but in this case, it’s not exploiting the victims. Instead, it targets those who might adopt its banal talking points into their never-ending culture war, elevating Boll’s work to a level of notoriety it couldn’t have achieved on the merits of competence. At least the bad taste right-wing revenge films it so flagrantly copies had the good grace to be well-made and acted.
Citizen Vigilante is a self-serving, arrogant and dishonest film from a star who should have known better, and a filmmaker who knows exactly what he’s doing.
Citizen Vigilante is streaming now.
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