The final scene of Uwe Boll’s contentious new film Citizen Vigilante has been circulating on social media platforms, particularly on X, where a self-appointed avenger played by Armie Hammer executes an entire family of Syrian migrants. The movie follows Sanders, an American veteran visiting an unnamed European city, who becomes a folk hero after taking the law into his own hands. He kills the family because the teenage son was part of a gang of migrant kids that raped a local girl and escaped punishment due to the judge’s overly sympathetic stance. Earlier in the film, Sanders also murders the judge.
The apartment scene is a gruesome and disturbing spectacle, bordering on snuff, with a mix of bloody home invasion and a smug lecture on politics. In a monotone tone, Hammer’s character asks the father, “Are these the values you’re teaching your children?” The father responds, “I teach them values from the Quran and values from our family,” to which Sanders retorts, “Do you know what I think? I don’t think it was the good ones that got out of your country—I think it was the bad ones.” This is followed by a hail of silenced gunshots, and the scene has sparked a flurry of reactions on X.
Citizen Vigilante is one of the most disturbing movies-to-watch-this-summer/” title=”"Chum" and Other Terrible Shark Movies to Watch This Summer”>movies in recent memory, both in terms of its content and its reception. Uwe Boll, a director with decades of experience making violent B-movies, has been a provocateur for longer than some trolls on X have been alive. However, even he could not have predicted how perfectly Citizen Vigilante would resonate with right-wing agitators on X who are vocal about migration issues. The film’s release coincides with a rise in Islamophobic and antisemitic violence in the UK, and on June 9, rioters in Belfast targeted immigrants’ homes and set fire to property after a stabbing was caught on camera and shared on social media.
Some viewers who watch Citizen Vigilante may find themselves underwhelmed by the relatively low number of asylum-seekers who die in the film, with the climactic sequence in the family’s apartment being the most violent and racist scene. In the rest of the movie, Sanders mostly kills cops, a detail that turns off some right-wing viewers while others justify it by labeling the police “traitors” for working for the system. Boll has positioned the film online as a brave act of political speech, and various bits of lore surrounding the production have contributed to this narrative. For instance, Boll recruited the canceled Armie Hammer for the role via email in 2024, and the movie was initially titled The Dark Knight, a provocation that was apparently rescinded after Warner Bros. objected.
The idea that Citizen Vigilante was “banned” in Germany has also lent credence to the concept that the film is a truth-telling, courageous work. However, the German ratings agency FSK did not respond to Variety’s request for comment on the matter. Regardless, the notion of a ban has helped to fuel the perception that Citizen Vigilante is a daring, unflinching film. People primarily remember Boll for his questionable and unprofitable film adaptations of video games, but the plot of “man slowly sours on society, then suddenly gets violent” is a theme he has explored in movies made from original scripts dating back to 1994’s Amoklauf.
This track record has led to some unexpected alliances among Boll’s followers. In 2013, Vicky Osterweil wrote an essay arguing for Boll as a kind of accidental vox populi after the release of his 2013 movie Assault on Wall Street. Boll has made multiple movies about American mass shootings, including Heart of America and Rampage, which has made him a singular figure in the film industry. “It’s almost absurdly neat that the man dubbed ‘the worst director alive’ is the only director taking the events the media treats as the country’s worst tragedies seriously,” Osterweil wrote.
Citizen Vigilante is not the first movie Boll has made about migration. His 2025 film Run follows a boat of African refugees from landfall in an unnamed town in Italy through a couple of uneasy days of encounters with the local population. On X, Boll shared a link to Run, recommending it to fans of Citizen Vigilante, which suggests that his new alliance with right-wing agitators on X may be either ill-informed or rooted in self-aware opportunism. There’s no way the same people who cheered on Armie Hammer shooting a teenage girl for her social media posts are going to appreciate this movie, as Run personifies a few migrants, including a friendly and sincere man played by Barkhad Abdi.
Watching Run puts Citizen Vigilante in a different light, as Sanders’s actions in the latter film seem to be driven by a similar brand of irrational, misguided vigilantism. He’s a stickler for order who pulls out in the middle of an encounter with a sex worker to lament the black mold growing on her ceiling and lectures teens on a bus about the importance of paying for bananas in grocery stores. However, in another scene, he argues that most people are sheep who would rather die than break the law, and then proceeds to drive full-speed in the wrong lane toward another car, which rolls off the road and explodes in a fireball. He’s killed innocent civilians to make a point, but the point itself makes little sense.
I have to conclude that Citizen Vigilante, despite its provocative marketing and Boll’s self-interested hype, doesn’t quite do what right-wing trolls want it to do. At least one self-described “former eurocrat turned proud patriot” posting on X saw this, too, writing, “Sold as the white guy fantasy for people sick of immigration, crime and treason. Actually paints those same Europeans as degenerate, delusional, hypocritical, cruel and self-righteous psychopaths who can’t tell fact from fiction, innocent from guilty, or have any sense of proportion.” This user was roasted in the replies, but their assessment is accurate.
What we are left with is a filmmaker who isn’t quite a right-wing hack but who certainly doesn’t appear to be afraid to work with that crowd for the sake of getting more attention. In 2008, comedian and actor Dave Foley, who was in Boll’s universally derided Postal, described Boll as being “like a quintessential German intellectual artist who has almost taken film arbitrarily as the medium he’s going to work in. The art form is, almost, in being hated. … It’s his relationship with the audience that is his creation, his relationship with the critics, more than the movies.” Almost 20 years later, this “art form” is common practice among people who manipulate online sentiment for a living, and Boll is playing in a dangerous sandbox.
Another user on X asked Boll if there was any truth to the hearsay that he used to make left-wing, anti-white films before Citizen Vigilante, to which the director replied with a perfect bit of anti-woke rhetoric that hides more than it shows: “The people who say that are mentally retarded.” Continuing the natural evolution of the release cycle he’s courted with this movie, Boll then went on right-wing media star Jack Posobiec’s podcast for an interview that Elon Musk praised. In a perfect coda, as of today, Citizen Vigilante in its entirety is now available to watch for free on X, accompanied by the text “The movie Hollywood doesn’t want you to see,” evoking shades of conspiracy and censorship. Uwe Boll has a whole new audience—if he can keep it.
