Review: Citizen Vigilante (2026)

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Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante was the most controversial movie on the planet for a week or two in June. German film regulators initially declined to give the movie a rating, effectively barring it from exhibition. This turned out to be a gift to Boll, as the overreaching move prompted Elon Musk to promote the film and make it available on X for free over one weekend. At the same time, accounts of Citizen Vigilante being banned spread online, causing the film to blow up among right-wingers in North America and sending it to the top of digital rental charts. 

Now that the online culture warriors have moved on to fresh controversies (like The Odyssey), you might wonder if Boll’s film is best ignored and forgotten. Boll, after all, is a notorious filmmaker and provocateur, remembered most of all for his bad video game adaptations from the 2000s (such as 2003’s House of the Dead or 2005’s Alone in the Dark) and for setting up a boxing match with his critics. With Boll at the helm of Citizen Vigilante, I wasn’t surprised to find it both provocative and messy, but it would be too easy to write Boll’s film off as simply a bad movie, as the few critics who dared to touch the film have done, perhaps in an effort to blunt its impact. 

Citizen Vigilante is also not just a hard and fast vigilante thriller in the mould of the 1970s (think 1971’s Dirty Harry or 1974’s Death Wish), as some of the film’s defenders would have it. As someone who appreciates the vigilante genre, I’ll admit that parts of the film are engaging, others explosive, even if the narrative is fragmented and at times incoherent. The film also contains some bizarre aspects, mostly related to Armie Hammer’s titular character, as well as moments that possibly cut against the grain of the rest of the film. Ultimately, though, Boll’s film is a work of exploitation calculated to shock and outrage the cultural elites in Western society through its reworking of the American vigilante film to address one of the most contentious topics in Europe today—migrant crime.

The disgraced Armie Hammer returns to the screen as Michael Sanders, an ex-military American on “an extended vacation” in Europe managing his late father’s real estate holdings. Sanders is also secretly “Citizen Vigilante,” as TV news and social media shorts have dubbed him: a vigilante decked out in a black turtle neck and long black wool coat, who hunts down criminals and their institutional enablers in his one-man mission to wake Europe’s citizenry up to confront what he sees as a broken system. As Citizen Vigilante repeats to his followers online, in distorted audio and pixelized video: “Remember, I do this for you until you learn to do this for yourself.” These direct addresses to the audience also showcase the persistent propagandistic nature of the film.

An early title card simply reads “Europe,” and although the film was shot in Croatia and looks vaguely Central or Eastern European, the dialogue is all in English, with characters speaking in a range of accents. The homogenizing image of Europe makes the setting anywhere and everywhere in the European Union, while strangely downplaying the emphasis on national identity that usually characterizes criticism of mass migration. This is just one of the film’s many strange facets.    

With the low-rent acting, limitations in terms of sets and locations, and haphazard narrative, the movie recalls the dirtiness and cheapness of a lot of 1970s vigilante movies, but Citizen Vigilante also contains important divergences from classic vigilante stories. For example, the action is more limited than I would have imagined. There is really only one big action sequence and it involves gunning down a SWAT team. He only kills several migrant criminals, importantly spending just as much time reprimanding unruly youth, turning the tables on date rapists, and executing judges who let criminals off lightly. In fact, characterizing the film simply as a narrative about a vigilante killing migrant criminals doesn’t really capture the film’s content or style, its non-linear approach and strange tone.

Citizen Vigilante certainly lacks a strong, clear narrative arc, which is unusual for a vigilante movie, which commonly tells a basic story arc. In your typical vigilante movie, the protagonist begins in some idyllic life, but then something terrible happens (by criminals), such as murder, rape, etc., which nearly kills the protagonist and destroys his idyllic life, so then he must stretch the law (or go beyond it) to obtain justice. Typically, the audience authorizes the antihero's vigilante violence because we have witnessed the nasty deeds done to him and his. Our emotions and outrage fuel our license for his actions outside the proper bounds of justice. Think Taken (2008), where the opening scenario in which the daughter is kidnapped under the threat of sex trafficking lets us buy into the violent actions of Liam Neeson’s antihero avenger.

Not so with Citizen Vigilante, which does not tell an ordered narrative, and subsequently lacks a strong narrative drive. Different timelines are spliced together, sometimes haphazardly. Sometimes the intercutting is so fragmented it is difficult to follow. We are also provided with no singular origin event for Sanders’ motivations. Instead, we get a scattering of different threads, some psychological, some political. I was about to categorize the film’s fragmented approach as entirely bad filmmaking, but the non-linear narrative operates in the very way we primarily consume events today through social media and news on the Internet. We sort through the pieces of an event and try to discern a larger pattern or narrative coherence. Whether intended or not, the narrative form speaks to our time. As well, the film essentially invites authorization for the antihero’s crusade through the viewer’s knowledge of extra-textual events. If you are aware of migrant crime in Europe, you are primed to licence Citizen Vigilante. If you haven’t heard about it, or don’t think it exists, you won’t.

But the ambiguity and strangeness of Sanders is the best part of the movie. Armie Hammer is good in the role, his intense blue eyes and deep voice key to the character generating feelings of discomfort and yet authority. The character is fascinating. At times, he seems psychotic, his desire to help not motivated by human empathy but rather by a sort of compulsion for order. He is a man who cannot handle the state of the world, in ways both large and small. 

There are a few standout strange moments that really work, layering complexity to the character. At one point, Sanders, with suppressed anger, lectures a group of unruly teens on a bus—one European girl and two migrant boys—about the societal impact of not paying each ticket to ride the bus. In another scene, he takes pictures of crumbling stonework on a building, showing obvious disgust at the ruination. With such scenes, it becomes clear that order is a psychological need for him. In another strange scene, Sanders is having sex with a prostitute, only to be distracted by the mold on the bedroom’s ceiling. It turns out he is the landlord and he proceeds to lecture her about opening the window after clients shower, in order to prevent mold. To read this scene as simply about Sanders being a landlord who wants to protect his property misses the bigger fact: he is neurotic. He cannot stand to see things out of order, and he takes his responsibility for his property extremely personally. Is the film suggesting that Sanders sees migrant crime as he sees the mold in the room—a problem that has to be addressed, something that cannot be ignored? 

In snippets, which seem to be from an interview we never fully see, Sanders talks about having little contact with his father growing up, going to boarding school, and joining the military. When Sanders reviews his rental company’s office and its workforce, he suggests “new blood” is needed. Sanders’ disregard and even disgust for the older generation is prevalent in the film—also connecting the film to the current divide between Gen Z right-wingers and the older conservative movement. Adding to this political dimension in the film is the only other character of real significance, an Interpol cop (Costas Mandylor), who represents the law and order side of the equation. He has some sympathy for Citizen Vigilante but thinks he must work within the system and thus the cop works to arrest Sanders. For the Interpol cop, preserving the system is more important than fixing the problem. Again, the film picks at divides that pervade our political systems. In these aspects, the film is smarter than many want to concede.

Perhaps strangest of all, what do we make of Sanders being an illegal immigrant himself? At one point we learn he came to the unnamed European country not exactly by legal means. And why is he American? In these respects, the film resembles features of US foreign policy towards Europe, perceiving itself as the means to restore European traditions and national identities. On a more mundane level, Sanders being American also allows the film to be a true Euro-thriller, in addition to a vigilante movie, and to tap into what Boll must have known would be his biggest audience, but Sanders’ American identity nevertheless layers the film with another thematic tension.

Unlike Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, Citizen Vigilante doesn’t just skirt the edges of the law. He’s not a rogue cop or frontier lawman. He is opposed to the whole system, which he sees as bankrupt and broken. In his eyes, most people are just sheep. To make this point, he even runs a citizen off the road and we see their car explode in the distance. Sanders doesn’t care. He is not a conventional good man compelled to take justice into his own hands. The biggest action scene involves Sanders casually gunning down a whole SWAT team. The appalling violence should underscore that he is no hero, but it also shows his extremism. If the film swapped out migrant criminals and their enablers for health insurance CEOs or defence contractors, the Luigi Mangione Left, and not rightwingers, would be applauding the film’s violence. When the fringes feel that the system is completely rigged against them, they will licence extreme violence outside the bounds of law or decency. This is the film’s real warning. 

The film opens with an anonymous quote: “All behavior can be traced back to instinct. When justice is denied, instincts turn to vengeance.” The quote attempts to justify Citizen Vigilante as a force of primal instinct rather than calculated political reaction. But this theme jars with Sanders’ speech at the end of the film, when he holds hostage a migrant Muslim family who has supported their rapist son, and Sanders expounds on why he thinks they cannot integrate into European society. It’s the film’s most propagandistic moment, followed by its most ruthless act of violence. Gratuitous violence and ruthless acts are part and parcel of vigilante movies, but this ending will still shock for its cruelty. Likewise, vigilante movies have often touched on concerns about the breakdown of social order, which is why so many of them sprouted up in the United States in the 1970s. Choosing to engage with Europe’s current societal and identity crises through the vigilante genre is a smart choice, but Boll’s approach is too messy and sometimes contradictory. For instance, I don’t think Sanders’ final speech actually sums up all that we have seen before. Citizen Vigilante is not singularly motivated, and much of the time his frustration isn’t focused on migrants. Sanders is far more strange and ambiguous—and interesting—than the film’s moments of propaganda want to admit. 

Cinema is full of provocative and dangerous texts. Some of them are great works, even if they are challenging to interpret and I wouldn’t recommend them to just anybody. A Clockwork Orange. Taxi Driver. Fight Club. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Citizen Vigilante is a great film, or anywhere close to those movies. Honestly, I can’t really consider it even “good enough,” because the editing is too incoherent. But I’ve never shied away from a movie because it’s provocative or dangerous, and sometimes such films are more complex than the subject matter might suggest. For vigilante movie buffs, there’s stuff to see in Citizen Vigilante, but even then the narrative probably won’t satisfy. But for thoughtful people with a range of views on law, crime, migration, and vigilantism, the strange character of Sanders offers a window onto a psychology seething with grievances and rage at current social institutions. For the forewarned, Boll’s film might be worth watching, not despite but because of its propaganda and provocations.

5 out of 10

Citizen Vigilante (2026, Germany/Croatia)

Written and directed by Uwe Boll; starring Armie Hammer and Costas Mandylor.

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