// KOTAKU — GAMING
Uwe Boll’s Racist Movie About Murdering Immigrants Is A Whole New Level Of Dreadful
We all already know that Uwe Boll is a very bad director. That’s been chronicled for decades, and while it’s perhaps somewhat impressive that he’s not learned anything about how to make a movie over the years, it doesn’t seem likely to ever change. But his latest, the deliberately controversy-courting anti-immigration action movie Citizen Vigilante, is the sort of terrible that you really must capture in words, lest it get away with it. We don’t even need to factor in the racism, misogyny and full-throated dehumanization of immigrants, because this is a hilarious inept film in every possible regard.
The elevator pitch for Citizen Vigilante doesn’t exactly sound great, but it does at least sound like a coherent film: Armie Hammer’s Sanders is a man on a mission. Wives and mothers are being murdered all around Europe by “undocumented immigrants,” so our man is on a spree to enact revenge on every illegal immigrant and person who defends them, determined to seek revenge through their bloody deaths. OK, sure, gross, but a film-shaped thing. Except that’s not at all what we have here. Citizen Vigilante isn’t even capable of establishing this outline of a plot. It’s just a series of scenes, barely attached to one another, each uniquely poorly made.
Vigilante begins with a cold open showing a woman’s death. With an establishing shot of a Croatian city, the film immediately gives us a sense of place by filling the screen with the word “EUROPE,” before cutting (and cutting, and cutting) to a lady and her son in a convenience store. The two leave together to walk down the street outside when a random guy with a knife brutally stabs her in the neck. Blood sprays from her neck as if from a garden hose while her son watches, and we’re off!
Oh wait, no, sorry, we’re not off at all. We now have a solid 40 minutes of almost nothing happening at the most meandering pace. Following the death of this nameless woman (who is never mentioned again for the whole film, and nor is her son for that matter), we’re told by a hilariously poor impression of a news program that in response there’s now an unknown vigilante on a killing spree. Except, instead of then seeing any of this spree take place, we’re given scenes of a police chief and his vast squads of heavily armored men with machine guns making there way to capture the killer, which is only ever intercut with never-explained scenes of characters who’ll immediately vanish, and Sanders’ banal and seemingly random interactions with strangers.
Sanders is on a bus when three rowdy teenagers get on and refuse to pay for their tickets. The driver demands they pay their “one-fifty” again and again, until Sanders stands up and…yells at the driver. He needs to get where he’s going! (He doesn’t.) The drivers says, word for word, “It’s just the thing that I will not continue driving the bus without everyone having tickets on it,” so Sanders gets out his wallet and counts out, weirdly slowly, a single note from a bundle of cash. The driver takes the money and says, “One-fifty times three, four-fifty, here you go, let me give you your change.” This is the movie! This is what we have to sit through. But it’s about to get so much better.
Sanders sits down next to the teens and now it’s going to kick off, right? These awful, cruel children, they need to be punished. And they are. Sanders begins an uninterrupted lecture on the economic consequences of their not buying tickets. I quote, in full:
Pay attention, let me explain this to you. If you get onto a bus and you don’t pay your ticket, if you go to the movie theater, if you grab a banana at the grocery store and you don’t pay, eventually the cost of everything will go up. If ten percent doesn’t pay, the cost will go up ten percent [awkward pause] to cover the loss. And that’s not fair.
I’m still not entirely clear why going to the movie theater is in itself a problem, but Armie Hammer says it very sternly, so let’s not question it.
But there’s an even we