I think somebody should experience a Uwe Boll movie at some point in their lifetime if they plan on commenting on cinema. It’s sort of like taking the plunge and putting on Plan 9 from Outer Space just so you can fully appreciate it for all of its glory. Especially if you’re among the sighted community and you don’t have to worry about audio description, you actually have to know what scraping the bottom looks like in order to know where the bottom even is. Otherwise, if you completely avoid the bottom altogether, you just walk around thinking that the latest Marvel movie you didn’t like is the worst thing you’ve ever seen, a travesty unto man, when it really isn’t. There are some truly incompetent films out there, made by directors who inexplicably continue to be given money to hack out another movie. At least Plan 9 From Outer Space eventually gave us Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. Nobody has made the Uwe Boll movie yet, although I feel like his time is coming. His latest diatribe, Citizen Vigilante, certainly makes him even more prone to parody now that he has decided to throw his hat into the political nonsense landscape, feeding directly into themes of xenophobia and platforming Armie Hammer as this weird antihero.

Despite living in the country of Europe, Hammer’s character still references America and drops the word “woke,” as if the entire world is using that term now. Congratulations, America. We started this hot new fad that is sweeping the world, and suddenly everybody is using this word. That’s not really how it works. We’re definitely not running around picking up slang from every other country’s political disputes and tossing around phrases used to describe the political state of whichever country they happen to live in. In this case, Uwe Boll, the famed German director, cannot, for some reason, mention that this film is German or takes place in Germany and instead sets the film in “Europe,” which I guess is now one singular country. Which, in and of itself, would make this entire concept of immigrants and migrants even more ridiculous. If suddenly all of the European countries dropped their borders and people just went wherever they felt like, there would be a whole lot of people living in different places because there would no longer be a specific European country for them to live in. There would just be the country of Europe.

The, for lack of a better term, hero here is a wealthy businessman played by Armie Hammer, whose name I don’t believe is actually said within the confines of the movie. He seems to own some property, and he also seems to not like the fact that there are immigrants in his country, except the hilarity here is that Armie Hammer has made absolutely no attempt to formulate anything remotely close to a European accent. So this is an immigrant bitching about immigrants, which makes about as much sense as a man who once lost the opportunity to play Batman picking up a script called The Dark Knight and thinking this is finally his opportunity, completely disregarding the fact that the film is made by Uwe Boll, and then watching the script get forced to change its name to Citizen Vigilante. At the top of the film, some poor woman is beaten by, I guess, immigrants. Rowdy ones, I guess. And this stirs something within Hammer. A deep hunger. A desire. No, not a cannibalistic desire, but a desire to exact revenge on behalf of others.

There are a couple of times where he shows up at a victim’s place and asks what they would like to have done to the people who wronged them, forcing these women to specifically express the pain they would like inflicted upon those who inflicted pain upon them. There’s definitely no turn-the-other-cheek philosophy here. No rehabilitation. No Jesus loves all of us. There is always some sort of retribution on the table, and Armie Hammer is more than happy to oblige. One of the victims is a teenage girl whose case goes to court, where her attackers are acquitted and walk away without punishment. So Hammer’s vigilante blames the judge, the prosecutor and, of course, the kids who got off, eventually threatening the family of one of them and forcing the boys into one location so he can enact his revenge. He thinks the cops trying to catch him are part of the problem because they aren’t doing enough to stop the immigrant scourge. Apparently, only Armie Hammer can save Europe.

Meanwhile, the movie absolutely has scenes that conflict with whatever heroism it thinks it is building. Hammer learns that he has a bunch of tenants behind on rent in one of his apartment buildings and debates with his underlings about why he isn’t allowed to evict them and why the system is broken. So he wants to get rid of immigrants and poor people, I guess. Would he mind if poor people were getting attacked by immigrants? Because he also seems to want to evict them. He apparently knows his property is being used for prostitution because he visits one of his own buildings and proudly tells a sex worker that this is his building. He owns it. What did this crazy lady think, that her pimp owned it? Of course not. He owns it. Now get in bed so we can have a random sex scene. Then, for some reason, he awkwardly brings up mold, as if this would be a natural conversation, chastising her for not opening the window to let the moisture out after clients shower. He is, by far, one of the weirdest vigilante antiheroes ever put to cinema because he seems to have no direction. He just functions like a multi-tool that Uwe Boll drops into every scene without any connective tissue between the thoughts in his head.

Boll’s script is terrible, and the whole thing feels like he shot it by going with the flow and running and gunning his way through the movie. He’s not one to let permits, funding or anything else stop him from forcing a film into existence. The best thing about Citizen Vigilante is the fact that Armie Hammer agreed to do it because otherwise the next most recognizable actor here is Costas Mandylor, also known as the worst Jigsaw. I think he plays a cop or something like that in here. I don’t know. There wasn’t any audio description. Of course there wasn’t any audio description. I believe in equal access, so I think even Uwe Boll movies should have audio description because everybody deserves to have access to the things they want to have access to. But Quiver picked this up for distribution, and Quiver has never exactly been a bastion of audio description, so I wasn’t particularly surprised to find out Citizen Vigilante lacked it. And later on, should Amazon decide to slap a synthetic voice track onto this? I have zero desire to relive this experience, with or without accessibility.

Honestly, nothing is going to make this film fresh. It’s a film full of terrible ideas from a director notorious for constantly veering away from normalcy and instead forcing his audiences to sit through whatever nonsense he has strung together in an attempt to prove he still has the stuff. It’s amazing how many films this man has made and how many actors he’s worked with. I know Armie is having a bit of a hard time getting gigs, but compared to that other recent cinematic atrocity, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, starring Jonathan Majors, another actor who has been deemed unfit by most casting directors, Armie is fully invested in this role in a very weird way. He makes lines work that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. Whereas Jonathan Majors seemed checked out for the entirety of Run Hide Fight: Infidels and obviously really wanted that paycheck, Armie seems to actually relish what is going on, as if he’s never seen a Uwe Boll movie before.

Personally, if I was an actor and I was at the point in my career where Uwe Boll was sending me scripts, I’d call it a day. I would retire. Maybe try live theater. TV shows. Something else. But I would definitely reassess. There are a lot of things I would rather do than be cast in a Uwe Boll movie. I have not seen the entirety of his work, but I’ve seen enough of it, much like Tyler Perry, that I feel like I have enough of his vibe to say unequivocally that Citizen Vigilante is one of his worst films. The only way I could truly determine that, though, would be to go back and watch something like Alone in the Dark again and try to figure out which of these two films is actually more egregious, and I don’t feel like doing that. I vaguely remember BloodRayne, and I think Citizen Vigilante is even below that. It’s definitely below Postal, which I at least had some tiny bit of fun with, and it is beneath his two nearly mediocre releases Tunnel Rats and First Shift. We’re probably around House of the Dead quality here. It’s just so hard to look at all these works, put them together and decide exactly where this thing lands.

The lack of audio description at least saves you from some of the random acts of violence. Instead, I just jumped from one Armie Hammer monologue into another, and I don’t think there’s anything audio description could have done to bring this film into a positive light. There’s something about the misdirection of Hammer’s racist landlord vigilante that I simply cannot get past, and audio description cannot improve that. I know nearly every critic has said to stay away from Citizen Vigilante, so it’s actually kind of shocking that this film is not sitting at zero. There are critics who watched this and apparently said, “This is pretty good. I like what this film has to say. Wow. What a great achievement we have here.” Citizen Vigilante might actually become a bellwether I use to filter potential friends moving forward. If I found myself in a conversation with someone trying to vouch for Citizen Vigilante as anything other than “I like to laugh at bad movies,” and instead trying to legitimize this work, well, I respect everyone’s ability to have their own opinion. That does not mean I have to listen to it.

Citizen Vigilante is a gross, unnecessary nightmare of a film featuring a star who, even with his history, still deserves better than this. I refuse to believe there isn’t someone out there with some film role, television role or YouTube series that couldn’t offer Armie Hammer something to do that is more meaningful to humanity than Citizen Vigilante. Everyone should probably experience a Uwe Boll movie once. I’ve experienced enough. You’re welcome.

Rotten: 2.3/10