A new thriller film has premiered. And it has spawned reactions from figures like Elon Musk, Milo and Patrick Bet-David, to mention but a few. The film is a commentary on a Western world gone wrong. Hereby my own deliberations on the subject.
I go out and about. I absorb things. I notice the changes all around.
I watch the signs. I see the writing on the wall. I take notes. And a sound bite from about fifteen years ago has haunted me ever since.
It was a harbinger. A prefiguration. An adumbration of things to come.
It summed up the demand for a change of the situation, a situation of stagnation.
And the quote is this one:
I'm gonna pull the whole thing down. I gonna bring the whole fuckin' diseased corrupt temple down on your heads. It's gonna be Biblical.It is from the film Law Abiding Citizen (2009). It is one of several vigilante films, about a private person protesting against the system. Films like Dirty Harry, The Enforcer, Death Wish, Taxi Driver...
And now we have Citizen Vigilante (2026), taking the genre into the land of multiculturalism. This is nothing short of dynamite.
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Uwe Boll is a German filmmaker, internationally active. His latest film is Citizen Vigilante. Set in Croatia it tells a story about an American ex-military, Sanders, going to Europe to handle his inherited real estate business. He also launches a career as a secret avenger, going after immigrants with violent crime background, perps the Law has treated too leniently.
As many critics have done, to remark on its cinematically rough edges, is wholly beside the point. For, I'd say, even from cinematic standards the film is good enough. It's like a Jason Statham thriller with a fast-moving plot and a hero with a stone face. The difference is that the script, by Boll himself, is pure conceptual dynamite. It says that European states treat multicultural criminals too softly. Revenge is justified is the message.
No one has ever said this on film before, not in multiculti topics. That makes the film stand out.
Boll surely isn't pussy-footing it in this one. He hasn't fallen for the Hollywood cliche of making the hero "complex", of adding a "black etc. alibi", showing that Sanders actually is a Fine Person. No, this guy is a timeless Avenger. The ghosts of innocent victims stand up from their graves to demand justice. Erinnyes of the Orest, cthonic deities of blood revenge, are here at work.
No such mythical instances are actually mentioned in the film. But the film is mythical. It mirrors myth of many kinds.
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To begin with, the mere subgenre of a lone hero taking action against a corrupt system is as old as the film medium itself. Yea, the plot even predates cinema; depicting a single hero doing his thing it is exploiting a core strain of Faustian legend. It emulates Robin Hood, Wilhelm Tell, Scarlet Pimpernel, the Lone Ranger. It is also emulating the Process by Kafka. It is Ghost World by graphic novel artist Daniel Clowes, also made into a film (2001).
There is more. Boll's film emulates the whole hard-boiled detective genre, summed up in Chandler's dictum "down these streets a man must go"... It is Western heroism, the heroic gestalt in Stetson hat and six-shooter ready: Shane, High Noon, The Wild Bunch, A Handful of Dollars. And it is the three first Dirty Harry movies and Taxi Driver. And the Jason Statham kind of film hero.
Also it is superhero territory, fantasy myth. The working title for the film was "The Dark Knight". But after a legal dispute it was changed to the current title, the owners of the Batman franchise having protested. But this is Batman territory, about a private person taking justice in his own hands. Talkin of superheroes Sanders is also like the Marvel figure The Punisher, doing the same thing as Batman but in a more questionable form.
Sanders is a kind of anti-hero. The no-nonsense attitude towards immigrant criminals ensures the film's total panning by liberal critics. Boll must be credited for not sugar-coating his message. He says it like it is; the message of "European law courts releasing rape victims because of their skin color, is unacceptable" is what defines the film. Boll is the "master of the obvious" in current film-making by even daring to treat this controversial subject.
He is brave. He brings home a message the film audience has never heard. This is the strength that comes from being an independent film maker.
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No liberal ciritic will endorse the film, will even acknowledge a fraction of its qualities. They can't. Bcause we're in a kind of religious war, the conflict of woke and its critics, and have been since at least 1995. It will be interesting to see what liberals actually appreciate the film, and then having to abandon their camp and be more conservative.
This film can be a catalyst for such things.
Can it also spur real-life vigilantism? I think not. Today's generation isn't energetic enough to do things like this. But -- you might say -- nonetheless we've had many lone gunmen recently. Yes, but they were paid by TPTB, doing lefty stuff like trying to kill DJT. They weren't lone and they weren't anti-establishment like Sanders.
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Citizen Vigilante is a film. But, essentially, this isn't about film. This is about politics, controversial politics. The film brings this message home: everything now is political. No one is neutral. Take sides. Your life, your family, the existence of your country is at stake.
This is propaganda war, psychic war, cultural war, astral war. As I've portrayed it in my eponymous book, Astral War (2023).
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You could say: Citizen Vigilante is the Easy Rider of our times: an independent movie defining the zeitgeist.
Easy Rider came out in 1969. And succinctly portrayed the USA in the Vietnam war era, a land divided between a ruling mechanic imperialism and a nascent mindful freedom. And it was a low-budget film, free of the narrative manners of Hollywood films of that era. Easy Rider killed big-budget musicals and over-stylized dramas like Ben Hur and How the West Was Won. And gave rise to Neue Sachlichkeit styled films like The French Connection, American Graffiti, and, yes, Taxi Driver.
Now Citizen Vigilante is doing the same. On a low budget it tells a story Hollywood would never even touch. It will most surely make its presence felt, if only in letting white actors come into their own again. Until now Caucasian actors have been all but absent from major films.
Randy Quaid said on his Twitter recently:
It’s beginning to dawn on Hollywood that CITIZEN VIGILANTE makes every action film currently in development in Hollywood obsolete, dated, and unfinanceable!
This sums it up beautifully. This is a landmark film, not so much for its stylishness (though it is good enough by far) but for its bold focus on having something to say.
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I've always said that "creativity will save us". And here we have a modern-style, action-style auteur filmmaker, Boll, writing his own material. This will go down in history -- film history, or simply history, period.
This is mythical. Out of sight. A land mark event. A game-changer. Like the Gerard Butler figure quoted at the beginning said, it is Biblical. The whole system is gonna come down.
Related
Astral War (2023)
Prometheus and Atlas (2016)
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