My Review of Uwe Boll's "Citizen Vigilante"

I stole this movie off the internet to watch it. I know who Uwe Boll is, and what he makes. I wasn’t disappointed, but, I still wasted the money required to power the infrastructure to steal it.

First, let’s get one thing out of the way: Citizen Vigilante is not the worst movie ever made. The worst movie ever made is an intensely competitive category containing thousands of entries, many of which were filmed entirely inside abandoned warehouses and star people whose previous acting experience consisted of standing near a bus stop.

No, Citizen Vigilante is merely just “bad.”

The movie’s central premise is that Europe is being terrorized by violent criminals, the authorities are too timid or incompetent to stop them, and an ordinary citizen must take matters into his own hands. This is a premise that, depending on your politics, will either strike you as a brave warning, dangerous propaganda, or a rough draft for a Facebook comment section.

Politics aside, there’s a much larger problem: the movie is boring.

This is actually a remarkable achievement. Uwe Boll has constructed a film built around vigilantism, revenge, social collapse, violent crime, public outrage, and angry people hitting other angry people, then somehow filled approximately 75 percent of the runtime with the cinematic equivalent of waiting at the DMV while someone explains why you filled out the wrong form.

The movie keeps promising that something dramatic is about to happen. It is constantly setting the table. Characters are angry. Threats are assumed. The audience braces for some kind of payoff.

For most of the movie, nothing happens. Or rather, something technically happens, in the sense that photons continue striking the screen.

There are only a handful of scenes that deliver the revenge-fantasy material the target audience presumably came to see. The rest is filler, just empty cinematic calories. This is the movie equivalent of opening a family-size box of cereal and discovering that most of the volume comes from strategic air placement. Most of the movies’ contents settled during shipping.

What’s especially impressive is that the film fails from every possible angle. If you’re looking for an action movie, there isn’t enough action. If you’re looking for a revenge thriller in the tradition of Death Wish, there isn’t enough revenge. If you’re looking for a provocative political statement, the movie mostly consists of repeating its thesis while wandering around waiting for the final act. If you’re looking for the anti-immigrant-crime revenge fantasy that critics accuse it of being, even that audience gets shortchanged. The movie spends most of its runtime winding itself up, then delivers what feels like about ten minutes of inadequate payoff before wandering off to the credits.

There is also, because this is a Uwe Boll film and apparently federal law requires it, a completely unnecessary sex scene inserted into the middle of the movie. It contributes nothing to the plot, character development, or human understanding. It exists largely to remind viewers that the fast-forward button remains one of mankind’s greatest inventions.

In the end, Citizen Vigilante is less offensive than it is disappointing. Whatever you came to the movie looking for (action, politics, outrage, catharsis, exploitation, social commentary, or revenge) it provides only a small sample size before returning to its true passion: wasting your afternoon.

It’s not the worst movie ever made, but it may be one of the few movies capable of making every side of an argument equally unhappy.