After decades of cinema chronicling men taking the law into their own hands when “the system” fails them, a thoughtful reckoning is warranted — if not necessary — about the costs, and complex morality, of vigilantism. A handful of films have tried, but when one of the world’s most popular comic book characters is Batman, critiquing extrajudicial “heroism” feels like tilting at windmills. Yet Uwe Boll’s “Citizen Vigilante,” whose original title somewhat ironically was “The Dark Knight,” manages to be so indulgent and incurious a portrait of a man exacting vengeance that calling it wish-fulfillment feels irresponsible.
Boll, a cinematic embarrassment since the early 2000s, here delivers a violent, incoherent, morally bankrupt slice of exploitation on the same qualitative level as “House of the Dead,” “Alone in the Dark” and “BloodRayne.” In fact, the film is so astonishingly bad, it almost feels like the writer-director-producer is deliberately sabotaging his star Armie Hammer, whose intended comeback can only be harmed by this project.
Hammer plays Sanders, an American living abroad in a country that — according to him — has been overrun by criminal migrants. A title card splashes “EUROPE” across the screen in capital letters, but without further geographical context, it’s difficult to know which accented character actors are good guys and which are bad. Boll helpfully clarifies by opening the film with a scene in which a hooded black man kills a mother in front of her son in broad daylight, and later depicts a confrontation where the parents of a rapist insist they are teaching their son the values of the Quran.
