Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante was released in select theaters and on digital last week, but the controversial director has taken things one step further and released the film on social media, where it will be streaming on X for free for the next 48 hours. The film stars Armie Hammer in his first big role since allegations torpedoed his career back in 2021. Reactions towards the film have been pretty much what you’d expect from a Boll project (it only has three Rotten Tomatoes reviews -all of which are extremely negative) but it has been garnering notoriety online, and now Elon Musk has gotten X to post the full movie.
Citizen Vigilante centers on a wealthy American businessman played by Armie Hammer who transforms into a notorious vigilante targeting violent criminals and corrupt officials in Europe, ultimately becoming both a hunted fugitive and an unlikely media phenomenon. Boll has said that the film is a “very dark and violent movie” which features “rapes and knife attacks” as it examines the “landscape in Europe.“
Boll told the Daily Telegraph that Citizen Vigilante has been banned in his native Germany for its extreme violence and alleged anti-migrant message.
“The rating system refused to give us a rating [in Germany], so now you can only watch it if you bring in a Blu-ray from Austria or Switzerland,” Boll said. “And I think they did that on purpose. It was a deliberate censorship decision. I hired a lawyer to complain about it, but we lost in a six-two vote as I was told that the film was inciting violence against migrants.“
The film was reportedly inspired by a case in Hamburg a decade ago, when a group of teenagers gang-raped a 14-year-old girl, left her for dead, and walked free with suspended sentences. “If you look at what happened in Hamburg, where the rapists walked free without any penalty, the coverage in the media was like ‘Oh, the poor perpetrators,’” Boll explained. “It’s as if we’re living in a completely insane and absurd political environment, especially in Europe, where people have completely lost track. There is a huge difference between so-called ‘hate speech’ and stabbing people in the neck. But facts don’t matter anymore.“
Have you seen Citizen Vigilante? Is Boll simply courting controversy? Let us know in the comments.