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Nine teenagers in Belgium committed the brutal gang rape of a 14-year-old girl across three separate attacks in 2024. The juvenile court granted the ringleader only a two-year conditional release, and most other perpetrators just 30 hours of community service.
In 2025, an Ethiopian asylum seeker sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and another woman near a U.K. asylum hotel. He received a 12-month prison sentence, which was later followed by a mistaken early release before rearrest.
In 2020, nine men with migration backgrounds gang-raped a heavily intoxicated 15-year-old girl in a Hamburg park in Germany. Most received suspended youth sentences of one to two years instead of substantial prison time.
These are only a handful of the harrowing cases that have inflamed public anger across Europe. Between 2014 and 2024, recorded sexual violence offenses in the European Union rose by 94%, while rape offenses rose by 150%. That escalating crisis, and the fury surrounding it, directly inspired Uwe Boll’s latest film, “Citizen Vigilante.”
There is not much plot to speak of. Instead, “Citizen Vigilante” unfolds as a “day in the life” portrait of a sociopathic crime-fighter. Boll has largely adapted a notorious 2016 Hamburg case — in which a group of teenagers gang-raped a 14-year-old girl and left her for dead, only to walk free with suspended sentences — staging it as a Tarantino-style revenge fantasy in which the villains receive their due in lurid, macabre fashion. The film is also a return to acting for Armie Hammer, who spent the past few years in professional exile following a string of allegations that did not result in criminal charges. Hammer plays Michael Sanders, a wealthy American businessman who has inherited a sizable real estate portfolio in a European city.
Alongside his day job as a landlord, Sanders works nights as a Dexter Morgan-style serial killer, targeting violent criminals whom the police appear unwilling or unable to pursue. There is little subtlety at play. Boll writes with a sledgehammer, depicting a vigilante redolent of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” but with the icy, menacing countenance of the Coen brothers’ Anton Chigurh. Through his mannerisms and delivery, Hammer conveys palpable fear in nearly every interaction. His stillness and unflinching stare are often just as unnerving as the violence.
Despite some critics panning the film as disturbing or morally dangerous, Sanders is not framed as a heroic Batman figure. He is a veritable psychopath, and his madness is presented as a consequence rather than a virtue. Sanders, or the broader sin he represents, is meant to convey the drastic measures that may emerge when governments and courts fail to enforce basic order.
Boll also tries to integrate social media, showing interview and commentary clips in which various online personalities unanimously laud Sanders’s DIY brand of law enforcement. “We need more guys like this in Canada,” one of them says. In reality, the online reaction would certainly be more divided, with civil libertarians and bleeding hearts insisting that due process remains an inextricable feature of developed and civilized nations. The film’s imagined discourse is far too uniformly approving and adds little beyond buttressing the notion that, after years of failed leadership, some citizens will inevitably remortgage their faith to shadowy crusaders.
One of the memorable scenes finds Sanders confronting a group of teenage delinquents on a city bus after they refuse to pay the fare. He attempts to explain basic economics to them: “If 10% doesn’t pay, the cost of everything goes up 10% to cover the loss, and that’s not fair.” The scene is faintly ridiculous, broadening Sanders’ scope to an attempted social worker — you can’t blame the man for trying.
Hammer’s performance drives the film and holds it together. The political anxiety and anger animating “Citizen Vigilante” may explain the movie’s purpose, but they do not make it work on their own.
The dialogue is occasionally clunky. At one point, Sanders says to a police captain, “These people never voted for what’s happening: a takeover of the Islamist extremists and the woke Left.” The line weakens his character because it drags him back into the tidy left-right framework he otherwise seems to transcend. Sanders is more frightening when he appears to have moved beyond ordinary political language altogether. Boll’s reactionary antihero is meant to spark a movement, and his anonymous videos to the press have the tone of revolutionary instruction: “I will do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself.”
The film is available to stream through Amazon Prime and Apple TV, and X owner Elon Musk streamed it for free on his platform for 48 hours over the weekend. (“As Armie Hammer makes his onscreen comeback, Citizen Vigilante teamed up with the perfect platform for a streaming debut… no, not The Daily Wire,” Deadline quipped.)
“Citizen Vigilante” was effectively banned in Germany upon release (as the saying goes, old habits die hard), but its ideas are hardly unique. Charles Bronson’s 1974 “Death Wish” followed a well-meaning progressive architect in New York who becomes a ruthless vigilante after his wife is murdered and his daughter is assaulted by a gang. That film emerged 52 years ago, when Hollywood was still willing to confront controversial issues through populist genre filmmaking.
Today, the same industry is more likely to produce Paul Thomas Anderson glorifying communist terrorists who bomb immigration detention centers. Censorious and partisan environments help create films like “Citizen Vigilante” — because when respectable institutions refuse to dramatize real public fears and concerns, lesser-known filmmakers eventually will.
The film’s most useful warning is that societies cannot allow confidence in the legal order to collapse. No civilized country can survive by outsourcing justice to unhinged men acting as judge and executioner. But such radicals are eventually drawn from the shadows when governments refuse to hold productive and honest debates about crime, integration, and the place of Muslim cultures in European society. A civilization rooted in music, alcohol, free expression, and secular law is not the obvious home for cultures that prohibit or restrict all four. If Europe wishes to thrive and endure, it will have to confront this crisis directly.
“Citizen Vigilante” is crude, lurid, and often blunt to the point of absurdity. Yet we still need more films willing to confront controversial subjects without genuflecting before cultural gatekeepers. Perhaps in the sequel, Armie Hammer can travel across Europe installing air conditioners. Germany is sure to prohibit that too.
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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.
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