Uwe Boll, best known for his atrocious movies based on video game licenses, has just seen his latest movie banned in Germany for its likelihood to incite violence against migrants. In a recent interview (as reported by Variety) Boll denied that the content of Death Wish-inspired anti-immigration flick Citizen Vigilante, due for release by Quiver in the U.S. on Friday, makes him a Nazi. And we’ve got this far into the story before mentioning the movie stars one-time alleged cannibalism-fantasist Armie Hammer.
Uwe Boll has always tiresomely courted controversy like an attention-seeking toddler pushing a vase off a table, and in recent years has made the inevitable move to far-right grifting. Citizen Vigilante is a wanton embracing of this, a film about a man who decides to go on a social media-celebrated mass-murdering spree of immigrants after his wife is stabbed to death by a migrant criminal. Deadline explains that “his targets are mostly, but not exclusively, migrants.” As a result, Germany has refused to give it a rating and as such prevented its release. So yeah, it sounds like a wretched power fantasy by the worst sorts of people for the worst sorts of people, and is best left ignored.
However, we can ignore the movie itself while still being astonished by the circumstances surrounding it. Because the man doing the murdering in Citizen Vigilante is none other than Armie Hammer, the former star whose career came to a screeching halt after a tranche of allegations of sexual and emotional abuse, including his expressed interests in cannibalism. Dropped by his agents, Hammer was also recast or re-shot in a bunch of forthcoming films, except for, extraordinarily, Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile. That film theatrically released itself on tiptoes, and not only because of Hammer. At the same time fellow star Gal Gadot had just upset many with her support of the IDF, and Letitia Wright had gone on an alleged anti-vax rant. Incredible stuff.
Compete Bolls
In a recent raw interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hammer revealed that he’s spent much of the last five years living in a rent-controlled tiny Venice apartment with a burner flip-phone, and has only one acting credit since 2022 before Vigilante, a barely noticed cowboy movie called Frontier Crucible. But then along came Boll, excited to give him a role. Because Boll believes in redemption and second chances? No, of course not. Purely because he knew it would get him attention.
Speaking to the UK’s Daily Telegraph (an increasingly unhinged right-wing paper), Uwe Boll explains, “I cast Armie Hammer in the lead because he’s a great actor, and also because he was cancelled and wanted to work. He wasn’t charged with anything, there was no lawsuit. He was just a guy who was famous and fucking around.”
You can read a comprehensive account of Hammer’s purported actions in Vanity Fair’s extraordinary profile, including the claimed cannibalism-themed messages sent to various women (Hammer has never confirmed he wrote them), which are truly too disturbing to repeat here, and based around themes of rape and murder and having sex with various internal organs. To be absolutely clear, there are no allegations of any actual acts of cannibalism, but a number suggesting Hammer’s coercion with regards to extreme BDSM had left a number of women seriously traumatized. So, you know, famous and fucking around.
Make Spacey
Boll’s ambitions for jumping up and down and screaming “LOOK AT ME! NO! LOOK AT ME!” don’t end with Hammer. He told the Telegraph that he wants an Expendables-like cast of “cancelled” actors, naming Kevin Spacey as another actor he wants to work with. During the interview he cynically goes through the motions, dog-whistling along to every alt-right theme he can think of. He mentions the awful recent situation in Belfast but of course taking the side of the violent racists, declares that Islamic migrants “act on the street, demanding power and influence,” calls Mamdani a “literal communist who just wants to tax the rich to death,” and does a whole you can’t say anything any more rant about how if you’re conservative about something like “the hundreds of billions being pumped into Ukraine “that you’re either a friend of Putin or a Nazi or both.”
The Telegraph interviewer, who describes this all as “refreshing candour,” then asks if he is a Nazi. He writes, “Boll laughs, like a man who has been asked this question several times before.” Inexplicable. “I am not a Nazi!” he replies.
Like every other Uwe Boll film, Citizen Vigilante will come and go with almost no one watching. It was filmed, like most of the director’s movies, in Croatia, where not only is everything significantly cheaper, but also offers generous tax incentives. It provides a 30 percent rebate on productions made in the country.
The movie also stars, oh lord, Costas Mandylor… No, that’s enough already.
