Low budget movie Citizen Vigilante has been a huge success over the last two weeks, in part because of Germany’s decision to ban the film from screening, and Elon Musk’s subsequent decision to make it available to view free of charge on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Rotten Tomatoes is usually a reliable guide to movie quality, because it balances critic reviews against large numbers of viewer reviews. The viewer reviews are usually better. In the case of Citizen Vigilante, the critic score is zero, while the viewer score is 94%.
Technically, Citizen Vigilante is not a bad movie. Uwe Boll’s direction is crisp and fast-moving. Armie Hammer as the protagonist Sanders is consistent, compelling and frightening. The movie starts fast, and does not let up. It is continuously, if dismayingly, engaging.
Nonetheless, I understand the critics’ concerns, and Germany’s decision not to allow public viewing.
Communities in Western nations which have welcomed large numbers of immigrants from cultures with values and practices substantially different from our own have genuine reasons to feel anxious: reports of large increases in violent crime, sexual assault, strained policing, and court sentences that are too lenient to deter offenders or satisfy victims.
These frustrations are genuine, and Citizen Vigilante trades on them.
But Citizen Vigilante is not a redemptive power fantasy. It is not about redemption or justice at all. Its protagonist is not a good man pushed past his limits. He is a psychopath, and the film, or at least a large majority of its viewers, mistake his pathology for heroism.
The evidence of this is what Sanders actually does. He kills people who simply get in his way. He kills to make a point, staging violence as theatre rather than as a last resort. He treats women as objects for his own amusement and pleasure, not as people. The scene in the brothel is horrifying in a different way from the rest of the movie, but it demonstrates the same inability or unwillingness to see and treat others as fully human
The crime victims he claims to avenge are barely characters at all; they exist only as a pretext, as props whose suffering justifies his next kill. A story genuinely about justice would be centred on the victims’ needs. This one uses victims and discards them.
That distinction matters, because it exposes the trick at the heart of the vigilante myth. When institutions look paralysed, the lone avenger seems purifying: unburdened by paperwork, due process, or restraint. Citizen Vigilante invites us to conflate frustration with justification; to feel the protagonist’s anger and mistake that feeling for endorsement.
But a man who murders for convenience and spectacle, for his own satisfaction, is not motivated by justice. His grievance is a costume.
Strip away that costume and the vigilante’s central flaw stands out: an absolute belief in his own infallibility. He is investigator, jury, judge, and executioner, with no check on his judgment and no accountability for his errors. This flaw is fatal to long-term stable society. Vengeance of this kind is not a purer form of justice; it is not even justice with the safeguards removed. It is not justice at all. Because he cannot guarantee the accuracy of his targets or the proportionality of his response, Sanders becomes the danger to public safety he claims to be eliminating.
Nor does his violence stay contained, limited to those who have committed grave crimes. Vigilante action doesn’t restore order, it accelerates disorder. Every act of summary violence invites retaliation, arms rivals, and forces police to spend their time containing freelance warfare instead of investigating crime. The result isn’t a safer street; it’s a theatre of conflict where bystanders get caught in the crossfire, and where fear, not law or a sense of mutual obligation, is what makes people fall in line.
The deepest damage is to the social contract itself. Courts can be frustratingly lenient, and institutions can feel slow and unresponsive. These are real problems requiring reform, engagement, and public pressure. Vigilantism offers a shortcut that destroys the machine instead of fixing it.
Once the protagonist acts with impunity, he sends a message that personal judgment outranks codified law. If everyone accepts that logic the only question left is who has the bigger gun. That is not, and cannot be, justice. Nor can it lead to a safer, more trusting society. It is a return to tribal violence as in Hutu vs Tutsi. It also provides a ready-made blueprint for anyone with a grievance to claim his or her violence is righteous, or at least, righteous enough.
Real heroism, and real justice, look nothing like this. They are slower and less cinematic. They demand institutional accountability, support victims as people rather than plot devices, and do the patient work of civic repair. Citizen Vigilante dresses up a psychopath’s appetite for violence as a solution to a broken system. Sanders is not the model of a cure for that system’s failures. He is a symptom of something just as dangerous.
Leave a Reply