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.
With all that presented, if you come into this movie hoping to see a white guy, replete in tactical peacoat and turtleneck, kill black and brown people all over Croatia, you might leave disappointed. Sanders spends most of his time fighting the law, as he duels Interpol's Chief Henry (Costas Mandylor) for the soul of Europe. In the film's major action set piece, Sanders takes on an entire regional police force from a bunker he built in an empty apartment, which sees him wielding two giant machine guns. The violence is gory and silly and over-the-top obscene—peoples' faces are blown apart and blood is everywhere. The sequence might actually have been awesome if it were filmed and edited better. Interspersed between the too-infrequent action scenes, which reuse the same footage multiple times, are long stretches where Sanders speechifies out loud to anyone and no one (i.e., to the audience) about the problems of society: that the justice system is useless, that the people themselves must rise up and rid their cities of the demographic scum that plagues them, that society is a delusion that must crumble—but, you know, rent's still due on the first. Sanders talks of his adopted European home as though it has become a urban wasteland, as if this were Don Siegel's Dirty Harry or Walter Hill's The Warriors. But Siegel and Hill had the grime of late-'60s San Francisco and '70s New York City to at least sell that vision. Meanwhile, Boll's nameless city looks too bright, nice, and sterile to convince as a hellhole. It makes for a funny juxtaposition in a movie full of them.
You can't call Sanders an anarchist, because he actively wants to profit off the capitalist system. You also can't really call him a straightforward fascist, because he lacks any structural political commitments. Instead, he comes off more like a dumber Travis Bickle with enough money to live out his fantasies. In those ways, Citizen Vigilante is yet another entry into a growing movement of cheap right-wing art that fails to really be art, or even coherently right wing.
There is a misnomer, propagated by both the right and the left, that conservative art doesn't exist or is exclusively bad. I've read many people whose politics I'm sympathetic to argue that conservatives are incapable of making great art because great art requires an empathy and a skepticism of authority that run counter to the conservative worldview.
In reality, there has always been great conservative art. Film itself has many notable examples, especially in the action and crime genres. I revisited one of my favorite conservative projects over the Fourth of July weekend, a little movie called Bad Boys 2. Michael Bay's magnum opus is about a pair of Miami cops who shoot and cause insane traffic accidents first, and ask questions later. It culminates in a wildly jingoistic display of American military force, which is illegally aimed at Cuba for the sake of rescuing an American hostage. That is the America Michael Bay wants to live in, where the women are hot, the cars are hotter, and the military industrial complex is fully unleashed. And guess what: Every time Will Smith and Martin Lawrence drive a Hummer through a bunch of empty favelas I stand and applaud.
Sylvester Stallone's Cobra and the Rambo sequels are also conservative in nature, and I love them. I've also always enjoyed Taken, the movie Citizen Vigilante is probably most indebted to, though there are plenty of critiques to be made there, too. Even outside of action movies, there are the films and plays of David Mamet. Say what you want about him, but there's no denying the guy could write, and write he did, mostly about men, in particular about how unfair the world is to white men. Tyler Perry's films are conservative, and people love them too, regardless of what you think about their quality. There are also the good, unconsciously conservative movies, like Sicario, Brian De Palma's Scarface (another "migrants are ruining the country!" classic), and She's Gotta Have It.
The idea that conservatism makes for bad art or that Citizen Vigilante is automatically bad artistically because it's conservative is, of course, ridiculous. The latter doubly so for the fact that this cannot be called a conservative or right-wing film, mainly for the fact that this movie has no real ideology or ideas. There's nothing coherent enough to ascribe to real politics. Instead, Citizen Vigilante belongs to another recent cultural trend that has become all the rage over the last couple years.
When Trump won again in 2024, many saw it as a harbinger of a new cultural moment of conservative ascendence. They weren't totally wrong, but the moment is not so much conservative as it is petulant. You can sense that in the glee with which online influencers returned to using the r- and f-slurs, or in the rise of streamers like Nick Fuentes, or in the endless conversations of the chud comedy podcast industrial complex. What returned with Trump in 2024 was a culture based mostly on men going nana-nana booboo at nobody in particular while alleging that they are the ones being persecuted.
With no hope for the future, and with the normalization of antisocial behavior online, petulance is functionally everywhere in the culture. It's all over the internet, where even official White House accounts are posting "dank" memes to "dunk" on the libs. It's all over stand-up comedy, seen most vividly in new specials from Tony Hinchcliffe and Louis C.K. It's all over the news media on all sides, where Fox News and The New York Times go digging into Zohran Mamdani's trash looking for something to complain about, and a bunch of grown men act like Paul Rudd picking up a dish in Wet Hot American Summer over the Graham Platner allegations. It's there in everything Bari Weiss touches. It's in the streams and podcasts that platform guys who are walking MeToo fire alarms. And it's all over this supposed wave of "conservative" films coming out in this second Trump administration. Not just Citizen Vigilante, but also the Daily Wire's trans-panic film Lady Ballers, a "comedy" ostensibly about how dumb and bad for the WNBA it would be to allow trans women to play, but that mostly tries to mine laughs out of the idea that women in general are un-athletic and uninteresting. The Daily Wire's next film, a Jonathan Majors vehicle about campus protests falling to Islamic terrorists, also fits here. It is cultural trolling, designed to rile up the imagined blue-haired lib scarecrow of their nightmares. There is no ideology, no lesson, no point beyond making a big show of trying to provoke the other side.
And yet these purveyors of petulance would do better if they actually made good movies. I believe you can get an audience to go along with most anything if your shit is well made and well executed. Boll's movie is bad not because of its petulant storyline, but because he can't write or direct. There are plot threads that go nowhere, gestures toward character depth or complexity that add up to nothing. The vigilante and the Interpol chief hunting him down never even share a scene together. This movie is honestly too boring to actually trigger anyone. It never commits to being what it's daring itself to be.
Like I do with most boring movies, I started thinking about a better director's version of Citizen Vigilante. Abel Ferrara, for instance, has made shockingly violent urban crime films, but unlike Boll, Ferrara has real interest in moral complexity. Citizen Vigilante has multiple scenes where Sanders goes to the victims of serious crimes and asks them what they'd like to see done to their perpetrators. This might be an interesting idea if these victims weren't so uncomplicatedly into Sanders's own vision of justice. It made me think of Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant and the way Harvey Keitel's terrible cop wants to exact vengeance, ostensibly on behalf of a nun (Frankie Thorn) who has been violently raped, but really for his own absolution. Even though the law has failed her, the nun refuses to give her blessing for Keitel's vengeance, which deepens and complicates the movie's themes without actually preaching in one direction or another. In contrast to that, Citizen Vigilante's insistence on neatness in service of the fantasy just feels hacky.
Lest the movie leave its intended audience without feeding it some red meat, Citizen Vigilante does end with one last valiant act of violence. Sanders arrives at the family home of a Muslim boy "accused" of leading a gang rape of a white girl. I put "accused" in scare quotes because the movie goes out of its way to imply that the boys were clearly guilty but were let off by a judge simply because the justice system cares more about the feelings of migrant criminals than the white victims. Sanders gets the family to admit that they believe the rape was justified because of how scantily clad and free the women in Europe are. He then gives a speech about how migrants are bringing crime into their new countries with their backwards ideals and their radical Islam, before murdering the entire family as well as the boy's co-conspirator friends.
Is all of this highly offensive? Sure. But getting offended by this movie gives it more respect than it has earned. Its provocations are so poorly executed, and its "politics" so thin, that it's nearly impossible to care enough to even be bothered. It's like the Laken Riley Act turned into a movie written by Grok. This movie is no more interested in "murder and rape" than the audience or political parties it is catering to. It is instead interested in attacking Muslim people and Islam as a religion. It is like listening to a Bill Maher rant or reading Elon Musk's Twitter but in the form of gunplay. Do I think the movie is trying to be a straightforward propoganda film for a white uprising? No, probably not. But like any school shooter fantasy film, it has a very narrow concept of who your enemy should be, and surprise! It's not your landlord.
With all this petulance, I do wonder what any of it means. If everyone is trolling, then what even is trolling? If it's all ragebait, then who are we baiting? I don't think it's a coincidence that the last few years have seen a rise in leftist political movements, things that make both libs and the right mad. Maybe the future of true political cinema will be found there. I just hope that the movies to come from that wave are a lot better made.
