Sanders is frustrated by the lack of public justice and decides to take things into his own hands by becoming a vigilante. He sets out to punish both the criminals and the corrupt officials. As his...
Why do I keep doing this to myself? Ohhhhhhkay, so if you’ve ever been slightly interested in filmmaking or journalism or any kind of film critique, you’d be hard-pressed to not remember the name of one Uwe Boil: the original Internet troll, certified edgelord, an exploitation maestro of German tax laws and has collectively earned the mantle as one of the worst directors working in Hollywood. So WHY IN THE HELL, in the name of all that is sane, did I decide to watch his recent film “Citizen Vigilante”, currently getting lauded up the wahzoo by right-wing users alike and starring Armie “Literally a Cannibal” Hammer?
Because apparently, I hate myself just enough to need a seat on this bashing bandwagon. AUDIBLE SIGH.
This is my first time actively seeing Uwe Boll direct in its entirety….and I’ve already gotten my fill with this gap-toothed fucker. Almost laden with pride and a heightened sense of self for something this cloying, the bluntness he displays with his direction should be remarkable; the man has never been known for restraint, last I checked. It’s just…..there’s nothing that provocative here. It’s tired, its rote and exhausting in his hands.
I don’t know who did the production design for this movie, but I swear to God this was just weird. Very bleak in a certain gritty, Eastern-European atmospheric kind of way, the limitations of certain sets and locations here do somewhat recall the cheapness and grimy dirtiness of specific vigilante movies from the 70’s, which is dare I say the only competent thing it succeeds in conveying with any degree of dexterity and effectiveness. At the same time though, we’re supposed to be in Croatia and yet the homogenizing image of Europe making the setting feel like anywhere and everywhere in the European Union, while strangely downplaying the emphasis on national identity that usually characterizes criticism of mass migration, is a kind of geographic mush that is strangely at odds with itself and it goes beyond strange. Sure, this could just be me jumping the shark on a situation I have limited knowledge about, but for a film that wants desperately to say something pointed about migration, broken borders and European identity, it is almost impressively reluctant to actually look like it takes place in a specific country with specific stakes.
Set up and communicated in the most disconnected broad strokes possible, the presentation here is nothing short of dismal. You could maybe get away with saying it’s meant to be isolating or intentionally alienating given the subject matter, but the execution is so flat-footed that it reads more as pure indifference rather than an inspired aesthetic choice, and considering how the low budget effectively hamstrings every concurrent technical and ethical element here with this invisible string? The film’s heart isn’t in that kind of intentional formalism—they were given forty dollars and a dream and somehow still managed to blow it….and you can bet your ass that implies to the other technical elements as well. God, this cinematography is so bang average it hurts, and keep in mind, Uwe Boll is behind the camera here. He can’t stage any action to save his life, something I’ve heard his previous DP’s were tolerable with before the editing hacked those to pieces…..but if he’s shooting literally anything else, the moody, gloomy camerawork does remains in focus for most of the runtime. Most of his shots still roughly feel like stock footage with the serial numbers filed off but at least you can tell what’s going on.
However, Ethan Maniquis’s editing is some capital Grade-E bullshit, emphasis on the E for exhausting. Constantly drawing attention to itself and exposing what little tension the film is capable of generating, it’s not quite Resident Evil: The Last Chapter levels of unwatchable (although the action sequences cut it close) but the way it transforms every single routine moment into this frantic jumble is absolutely asinine. Constantly cutting between three and four different angles to create a sense of forward momentum is not clever.
A pig on a scooter has more grace and mobility than the pacing of this fustercluck; on paper, the measly 86 to 90 minute runtime should theoretically be a mercy, but the non-linear format is such a ramshackle disaster full of cellar tape and wishes that whatever momentum is scraped together quickly becomes a noose around your neck. There was absolutely no reason for this film to be non-linear other than to pad the sorry affair out to Kingdom Come. Visual effects and CGI are both shoddy and over-the-top in a movie that never really alludes to such extremities, the film has next to zero focus and whatever focus it does lean toward darts from one half-baked idea to the next like a ferret on a double espresso, and in case you haven’t picked it up from my tone yet, what little action we’re given is interminably short, hacked to the brim and are surprisingly not that well-realized given how simplistic they end up becoming. I also couldn’t deal with how tonally confused this entire ordeal was. One moment it’s dead-eyed and self-serious, the next it’s drowning you in the kind of heavy-handed messaging that would make a freshman political-science student wince, and then out of nowhere it’ll lurch into some bizarre attempt at dark comedy that lands with all the grace of a wet sock. A classic template of not knowing if it wanted to be juvenalian satire or a serious reflection of the real world so it ends up becoming neither.
Rodolfo Matulich's ear-grating score sounds like it was composed specifically to grind your ears into a cheese grater and then light it aflame, but it’s not ear-grating in the way you might think; moreso with how muted, drab and gray this formless sludge of string arrangements play out. Barely any texture or dynamic range to suss out, it’s just this interminable, low-frequency hum that coats every scene in dust, making even the most theoretically “tense” moments feel like you’re wading through auditory oatmeal. Sound design is laughable with how many stock sound effects get put in at nausea, Zrinka Marckovic’s costume design is routinely basic in the showcasing of professions or social standing for how important they make said distinctions matter in context for the story they wanna tell, and let's be real: with the subject matter this film is surrounded by, this was always going to be an R-rated. You couldn’t not give it that distinction.
Everybody here in this cast feels so checked out; the acting in general is very wooden and stiff and low-rent in the specific way that suggests everyone on set was acutely aware they actively chose to participate in an Uwe Boll film and had already begun grieving. Almost all the dialogue is rigid, clunky or on-the-nose regarding every situation it throws us into and the characters are arguably worse. Every single one of them, major or minor alike, is practically a mouthpiece bolted onto a single ideological bumper sticker and a single defining trait—maybe two if they’re lucky—stretched over a vaguely human silhouette.
Armie Hammer gives out the kind of performance I expected out of a project like this: stoic, one-note and present in the loosest possible sense of the word. Costas Mandylor, playing the inspector tasked with chasing him down, at least suggests a pulse; nothing you’d write home about, but nothing you’d file a complaint over either. As for the remainder of the cast, they appear to have been dragged in off the street and forced to act under duress.
Just…just…like, I don’t even know the proper way to fully dissect the narrative at play here because almost everything about it is just wrong. It’s a troubling power fantasy aimed at the worst aspects of society, and the packaging of it so desperately wants to be compared to Death Wish; instead, its essentially one giant haphazard montage of unexplained event after semi-unexplained event after murder spree while cannibalizing every revenge trope and hardly taking any advantage of the ones that it does diverge from. Part of me is impressed by how it doesn’t even try to drown you in story when even it knows there’s none to be found; it’s white empty noise operating with the narrative sophistication of a YouTube comment section argument—every scene exists to confirm what the audience already believes rather than challenge or complicate it.
There’s no genuine mystery to Hammer’s character’s motivations, no real ambiguity about who deserves punishment and who doesn’t. The film hands out moral verdicts like pamphlets at a rally with unearned simplicity, and the sheer predictability of every “twist” would be laughable if it weren’t so aggressively self-satisfied about its own supposed boldness and relentless escalation of grievance and violence. Exhausting and numbing simultaneously.
The premise feels like a bloody waste of time anyway because the entire structural and political underpinning it’s selling itself on basically has little, if no legs to stand on. For what’s meant to be this brutal critique of a broken justice system, it poses as clumsy ideology that substitutes outrage for storytelling and propaganda for perspective while simultaneously dunking on the actual solid points it begrudgingly does make. Yes, it points out the universal growing sentiment about the law being more to subjugate and keep you under control, rather than to protect you, and choosing to engage with Europe’s current societal and identity crises as a whole through the vigilante genre has merit behind it…but let’s put two things into perspective here. If this is meant to be a mirror to Death Wish, Dirty Harry or Taken, I don’t think that works because those films ground their violence in personal loss and a grim, focused logic, whereas here the mayhem feels unmoored, arbitrary and never settles on what it’s really for, especially when Sanders is a raving hypocrite who acts crazier than Jake Conway from Ride To Hell: Retribution—constantly invoking the law’s uselessness while hiding behind his own lawyers, killing more innocents than the supposed criminals, playing chicken with a motorist just to make a spiteful point, and mercilessly slaughtering an entire family in cold blood for the sins of just one.
If the angle is supposed to be something closer to what Uwe already did with Postal—using camp and social commentary to expose how readily the state fixates on hunting down the vigilante while the actual rot festers, or to genuinely sit with the ugliness of what it means to hand moral authority to someone this unhinged—it fumbles that too because the film never commits to the bit. It wants to have its outrage cake, gorge on it, and then shit out whatever’s left onto a plate and call it commentary. There’s no satirical distance, no genuine reckoning with the implications of what it’s showing you—just this endless, masturbatory loop of transgression and vindication that collapses under the slightest scrutiny. it
And on top of all that, it is DEMONSTRABLY, UNFORGIVABLY, RELENTLESSLY BORING.
Similar to Mercy, it talks its ass off constantly in a bid to sound provocative but either never actually has anything interesting or new to say or ends up contradicting itself at the risk of looking even more stupid, childish and/or morally bankrupt. It’s derivative with how slapdash it is, and is so pathetically non-committal and fake that even on the few things it has a genuine point about, it can’t even be bothered to be competent with it. The damn thing’s meant to be hate speech, and it can’t even do that correctly; why is it that every time one of these movies has a far-right worldview, it makes absolutely no sense? It always feels like the worst excess on a project undone by other worst excesses.
I know my review might not have actively bursting at the seams with sheer venom on my behalf, but let’s not get it twisted: Citizen Vigilante is a vile piece of shit.
