Banned, R-Rated Thriller From Legendary Director Now Streaming For Free On Social Media

By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated 29 seconds ago

Nobody has ever accused Uwe Boll of being Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. Nonetheless, he’s a legendary director for those of us who love a certain kind of film: action schlock. He is responsible for bringing us absolutely bonkers video game adaptations like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayneand Postal. Even when he’s not adapting games, his movies are reliably entertaining…the kind of stuff made for watching with a best friend and a six-pack. Unfortunately, the director flew a little too close to the sun with his latest film, Citizen Vigilante.

This movie is designed as a comeback for the canceled celeb Armie Hammer. He plays an American living in Europe whose wife is fatally stabbed by an immigrant. His solution? To kill as many immigrants as possible, all of whom are portrayed as cartoonishly evil. It’s basically like what would happen if Death Wish were made by your obscenely racist, ex-pat grandfather. Accordingly, the movie got banned in Germany, so Boll decided to take matters into his own hands. Specifically, he released the entire film on X, where you can watch it right now before it gets taken down.

A New Kind Of Vigilante Film

The interesting thing about vigilante films is that they all have something in common: a man who is fed up with injustice and feckless law enforcement and decides to start killing criminals on his own. The only real variables are what sends the vigilante off the deep end and who he targets. In Citizen VigilanteArmie Hammer plays an American living in Europe (the exact city is not specified) whose wife is murdered by a violent immigrant. Afterward, he wages a one-man war against all violent immigrants while his actions are cheered on by supporters via social media.

To put it mildly, Citizen Vigilante was built from the ground up as rightwing catnip. It’s a film where all of your problems are being caused by conniving immigrants, and the solution is one brave white guy killing as many of them as he possibly can. The movie has (no shock here) been lauded by online rightwingers who typically wring their hands and whine about how politics need to be kept out of film. Boll’s native Germany ended up effectively banning Citizen Vigilante by refusing to certify its rating, citing concerns that the movie was a form of hate speech inciting violence against immigrants. The director has responded by temporarily releasing the film on X, where you can watch it now.

A Perfect Storm Of Controversy

Citizen Vigilante was always destined to be a controversial film. Uwe Boll has always been a larger-than-life character, one who relentlessly criticizes various Hollywood studios for leftist leanings and politically correct films. Meanwhile, leading actor Armie Hammer was canceled years ago after a number of women accused him of sexual abuse and assault. While the actor denied these claims and was never charged with anything, some of his leaked DMs to women revealed that he has erotic cannibal fantasies. So, Boll bringing back a #MeToo guy who aspires to be Hannibal Lecter is controversial, to say the least.

While Boll has spoken out against his film getting banned in Germany, he’s kind of living out his dream right now. Circumventing studios and rating boards, he has now (temporarily) released his film for free online. No doubt, he is hoping that the message of taking a stand against a perceived immigrant threat will resonate with modern audiences. What will happen when that doesn’t work, though? No doubt, we’ll get an epic online meltdown from the director about how nobody else had the creativity and vision to create what might as well be an AI film: “ChatGPT, remake Death Wish, but make it 1000 percent more racist.”