I have tasted the forbidden fruit: I have seen the film «Citizen Vigilante», which is banned in Germany and impossible to watch in Denmark, had it not been for Elon Musk recently posting it on X in its full length.
Of course I then had to watch as quickly as possible a film that is banned, and which well-meaning souls strongly warn against. We humans are attracted to transgression. The forbidden must contain essential secrets. If one does not want people to see the film because one fears violence against immigrants and immigration-friendly politicians, then one should of course not ban the film. How stupid is one allowed to be?
Bad art, but not uninteresting
Let it be said immediately: This is an unusual film. Unusually bad, but also unusually interesting. As film art I give it one out of five stars. But as a cultural phenomenon it gets full marks. I have never seen anything like it.
Uwe Boll’s film with Armie Hammer in the role of the vigilante Sanders is an aesthetically appalling and politically vulgar film, which nevertheless says something true about the state of Europe – something that is apparently so true that it must be banned. It reveals a continent with high immigration, a weak rule of law and an increasing willingness to censor radical artistic or intellectual immigration criticism. This should worry far more than Boll’s penchant for blood and clichés.
«Citizen Vigilante» wants to be a modern «Death Wish», «Taxi Driver» or «Dirty Harry» for a European audience, but it has neither the tragic weight, the psychological depth nor the formal rigour that makes the vigilante film a serious genre.
The three films mentioned are masterpieces within their genre, but Boll’s film is sloppily told, with long, empty scenes where nothing happens, and where the main character Sanders holds monologues instead of developing, and explains points to us as if we were feeble-minded.
The vigilante is precisely interesting in film history because he is ambiguous. He solves a real problem but at the same time undermines the rule of law. Boll reduces this ambiguity to a simple reckoning. Europe is under attack from criminal migrants, the state is failing, and the enraged citizen has only one choice: murder. As art, that is banal.
Precisely therefore it is tempting to dismiss the film, especially for the politically correct. But that would be a mistake.
The vigilante as a sign of failure
For the remarkable thing about «Citizen Vigilante» is the political symptom it articulates. Sanders is the figure who emerges when ordinary citizens experience that the state no longer protects them against violence, abuse and violations committed by immigrants. The caricature is based on something that is 100 percent recognisable: grooming gangs, gang rapes, knife attacks, murders and lynchings of young white boys, repeated sentences without deportation, and a liberal elite that prefers to talk about «inclusion» and «tolerance» rather than justice.
It is this crisis of trust that the film lives on. It portrays a man who looks at the courts’ lenient sentences, the political excuses and the media’s euphemisms, and decides that enough is enough. It is vigilantism, and it is unacceptable (especially gruesome is the film’s depiction of the massacre of an entire immigrant family – that is, collective punishment – and of ordinary police officers who are just doing their job), but it is also a picture of how a rule of law can undermine itself if it consistently deprioritises citizens’ security.
A real need: less immigration, a stronger rule of law
«Citizen Vigilante» is a grotesque fantasy about what happens when the state does not want to take this responsibility. But grotesques have a point: They exaggerate to show the contours of something real. Here it is the contours of a Europe that would rather moralise about the vigilante than about the perpetrator.
As long as this diagnosis can be discussed freely, there is hope. The only thing is that state censorship has gone too far. 12,000 annual arrests in Britain because of digital statements, and now the current example with the German ban on showing Uwe Boll’s film. Suddenly the problem is no longer the rapes the film refers to. The problem is that someone shows them in a piece of fiction.
Anarcho-tyranny has manifested itself. The state has given up enforcing law and order in order instead to censor, control and monitor law-abiding citizens and manage the images, words and narratives.
It is out of this anarcho-tyranny that vigilantism – and films about the phenomenon – arise.
The logic of escalation: from vigilantism to civil war
We do not need to take the law into our own hands; we need states that do their job. We need borders that are controlled, courts that judge, and political elites that take citizens’ fears seriously.
Art should be radical, provocative and criticise immigration. For far too long we have missed that kind. What must not happen, however, is that the state makes itself an aesthetic judge over which political images citizens are allowed to see. Authoritarian liberalism is afraid of its own population, as Vance said last year. These words are just as true today as they were then.
«Citizen Vigilante» is a truly bad film. But it is an important mirror. For who is it that has created Sanders?