The movie’s protagonist goes on an anti-migrant killing spree. Credit: YouTube
“You’re going to Mount Vernon?” asks my Uber driver, Mohammed, in broken English, picking me up from President Trump’s very disappointing Great American State Fair over the Fourth of July in Washington, DC. I tell him that I am going to nearby Alexandria. “OK, we will see,” he tells me, curtly.
So, where is he taking me? I wonder, as we cross the Potomac. He’s also behaving erratically — jittering in his seat, changing lanes without turn signals, and aggressively honking at the car in front of him. I check my Uber app to make sure I got in the right car. I tell myself that a 5-foot-5-inch-tall college student wearing a polo shirt probably won’t be murdered underneath an interstate overpass in Northern Virginia, at least not tonight.
Everything turned out fine with my Uber. I made it to Alexandria, and had a long and pleasant dinner with a friend. Later that evening, though, I was checking my phone on a street corner when I saw three men approaching me. Something about them seemed off — the way they walked, the look on their faces, the possible bulge of a gun holster on one of them. “You OK?” one asked me, with suspicion, in a strong Southern accent, a menacing grin on his face. “Yeah, how about you?” I replied, in my best, high-pitched, safely-American-sounding voice.
This, in a nutshell, is mass-migration society. On the same day that I — an ethnic-Iranian, with skin as brown as ever in the 90-degree heat and the last name Mohammadi — am upset by a rude foreigner who seems not to know where to take me, I’m also on the receiving end of what, in days of peak woke, we would have all agreed was a “microaggression.”
Mostly, such experiences are uncomfortable and annoying, but obviously not life-threatening. Increasingly, however, they define a global reality plagued by “diversity stress,” as UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari has written. And this reality has now been captured by the thriller Citizen Vigilante, a low-budget, 89-minute movie directed by the relatively unknown German independent filmmaker Uwe Boll and released last month. This obscure film has received attention in large part due to Elon Musk, owner of X, promoting it on his platform. It is artistically lacking — little more than Right-wing slop, akin to a Dinesh D’Souza production. But its celebration of violence and the chaotic society it portrays is useful in thinking about our own mad predicament.
Justice for ‘Citizen Vigilante’?
Citizen Vigilante, then, is not the mass-migration society movie I want, but it might be the one we deserve in our moment of online edgelording, heightened and extreme political rhetoric, and self-interested hyper-individualism. The movie is the story of a former US soldier (Armie Hammer), turned angry vigilante against migrant violence, and it distills the persistent chaos and apprehension of mass-migration society — by appealing to people’s baser instincts, and triggering their increasing fear of the Other.
Hammer’s character, Sanders, has inherited his estranged father’s fortune and finds himself in “Europe” — we aren’t told where in Europe, though the movie is filmed in Croatia — assuming the mantle of a wealthy landlord. In the opening scene, a young mother and her son are in a supermarket, all lovey-dovey, only to exit onto the street — where a black man suddenly stabs the mother in the neck, and she falls to the ground, blood gushing out. Clearly, Boll is pulling no punches with the racial fear-mongering.
Sanders sets himself up as an avenger for the native-born population, fighting both the migrants (portrayed as murderers and rapists) and the liberal, stereotypically Euro-institutionalist judges who decline to prosecute them — by just going ahead and killing everybody. Think of him as the strong and silent but easily irritated type. Hammer — yes, the same Armie Hammer who has texted women that he was “100% a cannibal” and wanted to cook and eat their ribs (10/10 pillow talk) — plays him, in his comeback attempt to film, as a righteous, anti-social lone wolf who repeatedly says: “I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself.”
In one outlying instance, Sanders also defends two young women against two white men who are attempting to roofie them. But overwhelmingly, the movie presents the migrants as the problem, and the anti-migrant crusade as justified. Its protagonist also has the predictable populist, almost-anarcho-libertarian streak. “What if everything they taught you was utter nonsense?” he asks the people of Europe at one point, to whom he speaks in blurred-out videos by hacking the main news station. Referencing Nietzsche — never a good thing, coming from a violent man — he declares: “We can change history, the state, the court, the police…. They only exist to control you.”
Many half-baked scenes follow: Sanders frequents a brothel, where the prostitute says she’ll charge 30 “bucks” per sex position (“bucks,” as in dollars, are not used in Europe); actors, confusingly, speak in a mix of European and American accents; the vehicles Sanders uses all have “EU” license plates (those don’t exist), whereas the cars in the background clearly have Croatian ones; scenes switch fast and with little plot development — in one instance, the Interpol investigator tracking Sanders for his vigilante-crimes manages to get his DNA off of a bar glass, and seconds later, we see a SWAT team entering Sanders’s temporary residence, where he is in a (somehow) impenetrable metal box, from which he manages to shoot the entire armed team and escape.
In the movie’s most viral scene, Sanders enters the home of a Syrian family whose son, alongside a group of others, took turns raping a young girl. While he is interrogating the family, the daughter, in order to justify the rapes, says that European girls “dress wrong and just make boys horny with their miniskirts — they show their legs and breasts.” The rapist himself says that he thought “she wanted it.” And the father argues that he’s teaching his kids “values from Quran.” Sanders gets the kid to call his friends and co-rapists, who aren’t in prison, thanks to a woke, liberal judge who argued that they were just having trouble assimilating, and invite them over.
Our hero shoots the entire family dead, and then shoots each and every one of the rapists as they enter.
Finally, in the last scene, Sanders calls the Interpol investigator and tells him that “Islamist extremists and the blind-sided woke Left” are taking over Europe, and that things must change. The investigator then gets hold of the prime minister, and we are led to believe that he has been convinced by Sanders’s argument, which is Right-wing slop in the sense that it makes broad-brush-stroke reference to “woke,” and sees “Islamists” as the problem.
Ultimately — unlike the better-directed and incomparable vigilante story, Taxi Driver — the viewer isn’t left rooting, not even uncomfortably so, for the lone man who takes justice into his own hands. This wasn’t Boll’s intention, but it is hard to see Sanders as anything other than a freak of nature: someone who is using social chaos for moral license to kill. To the sane viewer (i.e., not Elon Musk), it will be clear that Sanders himself is the gone-mad product of mass-migration society.
Much as Citizen Vigilante itself is an artifact of mass migration society rather than a critique of it, the reaction to the movie, too, indicates the confused, constantly warring state of a society plagued by diversity stress.
As Mehdi Hasan correctly noted in his debate last week with Boll on Piers Morgan’s show, the fact that the film is set in just “Europe” has the effect of flattening Europe — crime, migration, and social attitudes differ among individual European states — while reinforcing American conservatives’ beloved narrative of Europe having devolved into a Third World hellscape. Anyone can exit Frankfurt’s Main Station and conclude that something has gone deeply wrong, but to portray all of Europe as if it were Mogadishu is just incorrect. Hasan had facts on his side. Boll, while he poorly articulated and defended himself — at one point saying he couldn’t hate Muslims because he has Muslim friends — had vibes many people are feeling. So they spoke past each other, each man angry about his own parochial issue.
Further to the Right, there has emerged a theory that Citizen Vigilante is “Jewish.” The nutty Candace Owens, in her recent appearance on Shawn Ryan’s show, linked Armie Hammer to a bizarre Jewish-Bolshevik plot: Armie’s great-grandfather was Armand Hammer; Owens says this means “arm and hammer,” i.e., the hammer and sickle, and is not a coincidence. The content of her theory doesn’t matter; what does is that she’s tapping into a widespread feeling that people need to defend their group interests against an “adversary,” however real or imagined.
Justice for ‘Citizen Vigilante’?
In actuality, that adversary is not the individuals who hail from different lands, but the overarching system that has bred this chaos in the first place. In a US context, the mass importation of illegal immigrants who work below minimum wage and compete with Americans for jobs is not solely bad policy — it’s also indicative of capitalism’s cynical tendency to extract profit at any social cost. The H1-Bs whose hiring by corporations, in effect, amounts to an American Kafala, are not just here by mistake; it’s because the state actually doesn’t represent its people over a stream of easy-to-control labor. Without limitations, job protections, and proper protocols for assimilation, both migrant and native become strangers; sometimes, violent strangers.
At one point last week, Citizen Vigilante was trending number one on Amazon Prime. Although it has a Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 6%, the production has a shockingly high audience approval rating of 93%: a sign that Right-wing slop may indeed sell. Meanwhile, Boll’s native Germany has essentially banned the movie. And Musk, who may well have a role in the creation or distribution of the film, has promised that “Citizen Vigilante 2 will be even better.” Still more, an anonymous source told Puck that Hammer was “in tears” when he first saw Boll’s final cut: “Fuck. This is hateful, disgusting,” he supposedly said. If the measure of a good film were buzz-to-cost ratio, Citizen Vigilante would be among the best ever.a
The reality is that it is wrong to have a strong opinion one way or another on Citizen Vigilante. Really liking it probably means you buy the argument that Muslims are culturally and religiously obligated to kill you; or that Muslims, as individuals, inherently foster places filled with rape, filth, and danger — and a visit to Istanbul or Doha or any number of Muslim-majority cities would easily shatter that view. Really despising the movie, by contrast, probably means you neglect to see the issue at hand. The insanity might end if we were able to not talk past each other about it, which shows no indication of happening. There are legitimate Left reasons to be disappointed with mass migration society, as are my own, without any need to concede to (segments of) the Right’s race-religion absolutism.a
Until then, we will just have to deal with the annoyances of unbalanced job competition, large groups of people not being invested in the national project, the isolation of migrants and non-migrants alike — and the annoyance of Uber drivers named Mohammed smirking at the fact that they don’t know where to take you. Everyone loses.
