Warning – Contains spoilers.

The movie Citizen Vigilante has created one of the biggest furores about a movie or movies that I’ve seen since the days of the moral panic over ‘video nasties’ in Britain in the 80’s and about the movie The Exorcist when it was released in the UK. However the complaints from the Establishment and the promoters and handmaidens of Establishment ideologies about Citizen Vigilante are not ones based on issues of taste and decency as were the complaints about video nasties and the Exorcist were, the complaints are political ones.

This is because this movie highlights what happens when the established methods of law and justice break down and break down because of failures created by ideology within these systems, when law does not equate to justice. I might not like Billy Bragg’s politics but he was correct when in the song ‘Rotting On Remand’ he describes the legal system not as made up of courts of justice but instead are courts of law and twisted law at that. The lead character in Citizen Vigilante shows what Western nations might get if courts forget the need for justice.

First off I have to say that this is not the best made movie I’ve ever seen, but it’s one of the most important movies I’ve seen in a long time. Sometimes a work of art does not need to be technically perfect but is admirable because it breaks boundaries or tells an important story. For example some of the photographer Robert Capa’s pictures of the D Day Landings are really rough, grainy with reticulations and with some of them not as sharp as they should have been and some of them were lost forever because an over enthusiastic darkroom technician put the film dryer on at too high a temperature and melted the films. However those images that survive, grainy and with emulsion damage have ended up being some of the best pictures that illustrated the hell of the D Day Landings. This movie is somewhat of an equivalent to that, it’s imperfect but also important.

Citizen Vigilante is not a technically good film. The camera work is basic and some of the action scenes such as the one where the lead character confronts a SWAT team are very formulaic. There is little in the way of character development in the lead character unlike similar movies based on vigilantism and revenge such as the Death Wish series. Dialogue gets lost in the background sometimes due to poor audio recording and the use of flashbacks and flash forwards is clunky. There are some aspects of the film which leave me baffled such as what happened to the Western woman who is hanging around with the wrong’uns and who seems to disappear during the phone mugging scene? Where’d she gone? Did she run off when things got nasty? This wasn’t shown and maybe it should have been shown. It could have been played and shown thus: The vigilante kills the traitor woman who had thrown her lot in with the invaders or alternatively and in my view better he spares the woman in order to carry the vigilante’s message. The final scenes were good but could be better and one later scene might have been better off earlier in the movie.

However the very worst thing about this movie is that it’s not something conjoured up in the imagination of the writers, it’s not from some outrageous plotline from a novel. What is truly awful is that it’s based on real life crimes carried out by migrants who have victimised the indigenous in the numerous countries that they’ve dumped themselves on.

The lead character, the vigilante, is not well drawn and neither is his operation. There’s no real explanation as to how he acquired the arsenal of weapons and associated ammunition that he has and the vigilante seems to have no idea about either operational security or data security. How he got to be able to do what he did and how he managed to evade detection for so long is not explained and I think the movie is poorer for that.

The vigilante is not a sympathetic character. He’s cold and emotionless and doesn’t always take out the bad guys. If the director Uwe Boll had made his vigilante character a bit less of a psychopath and showed much more of a man’s decline into vigilantism then this movie might have been better at telling the story of a man who has had enough of the problems that afflict our societies.

But I have to look beyond the technical and other faults and concentrate on the movies various messages. This is a movie that many people will not watch because of its artistic merits or entertainment value which many people do even when Hollywood infuses their movies with unwanted leftist ‘messages’, but primarily for the counter Establishment messages it gives. These messages are that the West has imported people who are not just incompatible but a danger to the rest of us, that justice systems have become institutions that promote ideology over justice, that the political classes will say anything at all no matter how outlandish instead of acknowledging the West’s real problems and that some people will follow the Establishment’s rules even if it costs them their lives. It doesn’t shy away from criticising Islamism nor the Woke Left nor the government departments and agencies that Islamists and the Woke Left across the West have taken over and hollowed out.

Is this a great well made movie? No of course it is not. There’s a multitude of criticisms that this movie can be subjected to on technical and artistic grounds. However it is an important movie because it’s the first movie I’ve seen in ages that is honest about the problems that the West faces and how the citizens of Western nations have been let down by the very governmental, administrative and legal systems that were supposed to protect them.

Despite what some will say I do not see this movie as an encouragement of vigilantism. I do not see the movie’s key line of ‘I do this until you do it yourselves’ as an exhortation to people to take the law into their own hands. Instead I see this line as an instruction to the people’s of the West to take back their governments by political means and hold the political and judicial classes accountable for their actions. The movie seems to be a warning about what might happen if things continue to decline. The idea that an average person would see this movie and go out and play at being a vigilante is in my view preposterous. After all very few people, if any, watched the original Batman movie and went out and set themselves up as their own city’s saviour. Most people can watch a movie, maybe understand or accept the messages but not copy exactly what they’ve seen on the screen.

No wonder the government’s of nations such as Germany have banned this movie. They’ve banned it because it in its clunky way tells the truth about what has gone disastrously wrong in Western nations and in Germany in particular. The Germans of all people should not have censored this movie because they should know that those who censor movies or speech or writing that touch on matters of great importance, are never the ‘good guys’. Germany’s history from the days of the Kaiser through the Nazi period and throughout the existence of the German Democratic Republic should have taught them that at least.

This is in my view a ‘must watch’ movie. I say that not because it’s great art like Hitchcock or movies like Star Wars which breathed new life into a tired space opera genre or managed to successfully translate a much loved book onto the big screen such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I treat this as a must see movie because it is honest about contemporary problems and shows what might happen if things continue on their current and dangerous path.

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This article has also been published at:  https://peakd.com/movies/@mrfahrenheit211/movie-review-citizen-vigilante-2026