It Feels Weird To Have Co-Written a Book Defending Uwe Boll and Postal Now That's He's Made the Armie Hammer Comeback Movie Citizen Vigilante, the Most Racist Film Since The Birth of a Nation

When I was laid off by The Dissolve in 2015, I received many unusual and intriguing offers. One was from Boss Fight Books, a small publishing house that puts out books about video games. I hadn’t played video games regularly since I was a teenager living in a home for emotionally disturbed adolescents, but I had a very big idea nonetheless.

I proposed writing a book about the video game and movie Postal with my friend Brock Wilbur. Wilbur, a video game journalist by trade at the time, would cover the video game side of the book, while I would write about the feature film adaptation, focusing on its eccentric and widely reviled creator, Uwe Boll, the most hated man in movies AND video games.

That’s no small feat. It takes a lot to become the most despised figure in your field. To become the most reviled creator in two fields represents an extraordinary accomplishment of the bleakest sort.

Boll understandably hated being called the worst filmmaker in the world, but he also actively courted the public’s hatred. He was a troll who railed against Hollywood, the video game industry, more successful directors, and video game fans in audio commentaries overflowing with bitterness and anger.

Boll infamously volunteered to box his critics. He wasn’t just pugilistic in his public persona and treatment of detractors: he was an accomplished boxer who derived great pleasure from beating up dweebs who mocked him online.

I saw Postal as his masterpiece, a savage satirical attack on everything, delivered by a foreigner with a unique perspective and fascinating backstory. It was a work of pure nihilism, spraying invective in every direction.

I interviewed Boll for several hours while researching Postal, and found him a pleasure to talk to.

So it brings me no joy to report that Citizen Vigilante, Boll’s most recent film and his most high-profile production in ages, is the most racist film since D.W Griffith’s controversial 1915 melodrama The Birth of a Nation.

Citizen Vigilante was originally titled The Dark Knight before Warner Brothers stepped in and informed Boll that he couldn’t recycle the title of one of the most famous films of the past fifty years. The towering Teutonic terror reportedly experimented with other titles like Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, Batman Begins, The Lego Batman Movie, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and The Batman. Warner Bros. nixed these alternatives because they’re already the titles of Batman movies.

Citizen Vigilante represents a spectacularly unsuccessful comeback attempt for Armie Hammer, a scion of a wealthy dynasty whose privileged career high atop the A-list crashed and burned when accusations surfaced that he wasn’t a garden-variety creep but rather a sex cannibal whose fetish for flesh repulsed women in his orbit and earned him a cancellation.

Once upon a time, a 19-year-old Hammer was cast as Bruce Wayne, AKA Batman, AKA The Dark Knight, in Justice League: Mortal, a superhero team-up movie to be directed by George Miller that never made it out of development hell. Instead of playing Batman in a 220 million dollar blockbuster for the director of Mad Max: Fury Road, he played a bootleg, off-brand, Temu Bruce Wayne in a movie that looks like it was made for pocket change and was directed by a man seemingly eager to prove to moviegoers who had already mostly forgotten him that he really was the worst filmmaker in the world, for moral rather than technical reasons.

Citizen Vigilante opens, dramatically, if nonsensically, with the words, “All behavior can be traced back to instincts. When justice is denied, instincts turn to vengeance”, which is credited to “Anonymous.” When a movie opens with a quote attributed to NOBODY, I always assume, rightfully, that it’s some bullshit the filmmakers made up to seem smart and profound.

This seems to refer to what the film sees as undocumented migrants’ unshakeable instinct to rape, murder, steal, and not pay bus fare, and Europeans’ instinct to want to avoid the undocumented migrants responsible for all of the violence, crimes, and problems in their continent and the world. When justice is denied by corrupt judges who think that rape, murder, theft, and disrespecting bus drivers can be cured by hugs, sunshine, puppy therapy, and participation trophies, then it falls upon a glowering, dead-eyed, robotic murder machine to enact righteous vengeance.

Movies about revenge frequently depict it as a hollow, empty exercise that creates a cycle of violence and solves nothing. Not Citizen Vigilante. It instead proposes that revenge is an awesome and deeply satisfying endeavor that solves all our problems.

Citizen Vigilante opens in EUROPE, the continent, rather than any individual country, to illustrate that unhinged Muslim immigrants from African and Middle Eastern countries terrorizing citizens is one that affects all of Europe’s terrified, righteous white people, not just the scared inhabitants of one particular country.

This odious fascist revenge fantasy opens with a white mother and her child shopping at a grocery store. On their way home, the mother is stabbed to death by a dirty foreigner who is probably committing his seventh or eighth thrill kill of the day.

Who will save the innocent white maidens of Europe from the mongrel hordes of Darkest Africa? Women are afraid to go out at night for fear of being raped, murdered, robbed, or beaten. Children are too scared to go out and play out of fear of ending up on the business end of an old-fashioned undocumented migrant’s musket. Bus drivers live in mortal terror of juvenile delinquents sassing them.

Won’t someone think of the children, the beautiful, beautiful white children?

The only man rich, righteous, and ruthless enough to put brown-skinned immigrant scum in the ground where they belong is Sanders (Hammer), a former U.S Army officer who moved to Europe to handle his late father’s business dealings.

In news clips and social media, we learn that public opinion on the Citizen Vigilante’s spree is divided. Some think he’s just what society needs. Others think he’s a hero and an inspiration to all. But there are also those who consider him the antidote to the disease of crime. Lastly, a good percentage of the public thinks he’s great and should keep doing what he’s doing.

Not everyone loves Citizen Vigilante’s righteous rampage. Interpol Regional Chief Henry (Costas Mandylor) is jealous because the madman who has anointed himself judge, jury, and executioner is doing his job much better than he is.

Sanders visits a woman who has been brutally raped by foreigners and gives her two options. Does she want to subject herself to a messy, invasive trial in which she’ll be forced to recount the most horrific moments of her life over and over again, only to risk a Not Guilty verdict and the possibility that the men who assaulted her will walk free, or does she want real justice, the kind that comes from the barrel of a gun or the blade of a knife.

She doesn’t explicitly say, “Kill those brown-skinned vermin; kill them dead!” but she nevertheless acquiesces to his extreme proposal.

Then there’s an endless sequence at a brothel that serves no purpose other than gratuitous nudity (this is a Uwe Boll movie, after all) and to show that Sanders has a sensible side, since he’s concerned about the presence of mold in a building that he owns.

Hammer isn’t big on emotions here. He’s seemingly as disturbed by the mold in one of the properties he manages as he is by the immigration-fueled crimes he avenges.

Sanders is always on the job. At a bar, he spots degenerates trying to drug a pair of pretty girls’ drinks and switches the glasses so they end up roofying themselves. In a refreshing change of pace, the guilty party appears to be creepy white dudes, not brown-skinned immigrant criminals.

Sanders doesn’t just kill criminals; when they get in his way, he kills lawmen as well. When a SWAT team comes gunning for him, he uses his arsenal to slaughter them en masse. They may ostensibly be good guys, but they deserve to die because they’re going after Europe’s greatest hero instead of reserving their firepower for muslim rape gangs.

Our psychotic antihero is a prissy little bitch who grows apoplectic when he discovers that 10 percent of his tenants don’t pay their rent, but due to fucking bureaucracy and the mollycoddling of the courts, they get to stay in their apartments for months and months and months despite non-payment. What a relatable development.

Late in Citizen Vigilante, we get the purest straw man in film history when we see a clip of the Judge that our mass-murdering anti-hero is going to shoot full of heroin to fake a suicide, rationalizing his decision to let a gaggle of immigrant gang rapists go free because they didn’t get enough hugs as children, assimilation is hard, and aren’t they victims every bit as much as the girl that they brutally assaulted?

“The gang rape was in many ways a cry for help and structure. Not only is the young girl the victim: they are also victims. Not only was the victim traumatized. The perpetrators were traumatized as well,” are the judge’s exact words.

Sanders casts a wide net. He doesn’t just go after criminals. He also goes after the judges who set them free, as well as a rapist’s family: his MUSLIM family.

Sanders goes to visit the home of Yusuf, one of the rapists of a 14-year-old girl. Sanders tells Yusuf’s sister that he hasn’t seen any remorse from her on social media; in fact, she posted that she deserved to be raped because she made boys horny with her miniskirt.

“Are these the values that you teach your children?” Sanders gloweringly asks the patriarch as he points a giant gun at him and his family.

“I teach them the values from the Koran and the values from our family,” the father weakly insists.

“If THESE are your values, that women in America and Europe deserve to be raped because of a dress code; why did you come here?” Sanders urgently inquires.

When he answers that his family was fleeing a war. Sanders really drives the point (Islamophobia) home when he sneers, “I don’t think it was the good ones who got out of your country. I think it was the bad ones. And I think you brought with you your archaic value system and your commitment to religion over democracy, and over anything else, including the rule of law.”

Then he has the teen rapist invite all his fellow rapists over so that he can murder them. He also murders Yusuf’s family.

Sanders ends the film by calling up Interpol Regional Chief Henry and decrying, “a takeover by the Islamist extremists and the blindsided woke left. And if this takeover is successful, then it’ll destroy the democracy you say you love: all the freedom, everything you say you enjoy and stand for. There’s only one option. You end this, or we the people will end it ourselves.”

The poster boy for Islamophobia orders Interpol Regional Chief Henry to deliver an important message to the country’s leaders and the entirety of the press: Europe needs to crack down on immigration, or it’ll turn into a third-world hellhole full of evil Muslims destroying everything they touch. Boll is mad as hell about undocumented migration, and he isn’t going to take it anymore. Won’t someone listen and heed his message of hate?

Needless to say, that is not a message that I endorse, but it is more or less MAGA’s philosophy and the philosophies of countless MAGA-adjacent far-right-wing politicians.

We end on a happy note, with the news that all the teenagers who participated in the gang rape have been murdered. One rapist even lost his whole family. We’re then treated to scary crime statistics about all the murders and rapes committed by Muslims from Africa.

Citizen Vigilante is so extreme in its messaging that even Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump would find it heavy-handed and extreme, and encourage them to tone down the Nazism a bit.

The irony is that someone very prominently involved with Citizen Vigilante has been accused of committing horrible sex crimes against women. They aren’t the actors of color playing rapists and thrill killers, but rather the handsome, straight former movie star from an auspicious family in a lead role in a movie that is in terrible taste and bites off more than it can chew, thematically speaking. Hammer apparently thought he could make a meal of this role, but this is paltry fare.

Don’t let that fool you! Ignore all of the horrible real crimes committed by powerful, connected white people and keep your eyes focused on vulnerable minorities whose lives are difficult enough without being portrayed as evil Muslim monsters in a uniquely inept, ugly piece of racist propaganda.

In conclusion, I did not care for this film.

0 Stars out of 5

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