Citizen Vigilante director Uwe Boll defended his movie primarily as a response to the ongoing cover-up, both by politicians and the entertainment industry, about the very real horrors inflicted on society by migrant criminals.
“If you watch any German movie, all the migrants are perfectly integrated, intelligent, perfectly German-speaking people, and that’s just wrong,” he said. “That’s not the case.”
“If you [submit] something to Netflix where a migrant guy is a murderer, they will not do it because they want to be so politically correct,” he added. “They’re not doing it. [My] movie is kind of a revolt against it, to show like, no, there has to be a space even for very brutal, one-sided movies.”
The entire interview is worth watching. The interviewer doesn’t hide his disgust with a movie he sees as a racist attack on migrants. Nevertheless, he’s polite and fair to Boll and allows him to speak his piece.
For his part, Boll does a superb and articulate job of defending his movie while not defending the indefensible things his lead character, played by Armie Hammer, does. As he explains, having a sociopath as a protagonist is nothing new. He specifically refers to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Later in the interview, he brings up Taxi Driver. Both of those movies use in-your-face bluntness to say something about society.
Boll also makes the point I have made: that race/racism has nothing to do with the character’s motives. Hammer targets plenty of people who are not migrants and who are white.
“My choice to make him an ice-cold, not sympathetic person, was on purpose. I didn’t want that everybody loves him. I wanted the audience to keep its distance from him,” Boll explained what should really be obvious to everyone. Then he tells a story that adds a lot of insight into what Boll was aiming for.
“Armie, when we cut the movie, he said, ‘Cut the car scene out.’” Boll says he refused. “It shows he is more about the principle and less about the consequence. He goes for collateral damage, and doesn’t really care.”
Boll goes on to explain that this “twisted” moment is precisely the point. Just when you might agree with what the Hammer character is doing, he “goes way too far.”
He adds that so many movies are touted as “important” when they are not. “They have nothing to do with the reality, and I made a movie that has to do exactly with reality.”
Then he explained why he made the movie. “People in Europe see that things don’t work with migration. They [wonder] why we do this… and why are we not getting a grip on it. I wanted to upset, and at the same time, really push the envelope that people [are] getting upset” over migrant crime.
The racist argument makes no sense. If it were racist, Citizen Vigilante would target all non-white people. The anti-migrant argument makes no sense. If it were anti-migrant, Citizen Vigilante would target all migrants.
Armie Hammer’s character 1) kills more white people than non-white people, and 2) kills plenty of non-migrants.
Armie Hammer’s character is a messenger always on message, even if he must deliver that message by driving an innocent driver off the road, which results in a fiery death.
Boll’s message is a moral one: We are becoming the proverbial boiling frog, accepting atrocities for fear of being seen as “bad people,” even if that means switching lanes to save our own lives; for fear of being called “racist,” even if that means allowing migrants to rape, murder, and pillage with no consequence.
What Uwe Boll did here was no different from what Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, and other political filmmakers have done, which is beat the audience over the head to make a socio-political point.
It was a very brave thing for him to do, and artistically, he hit the bullseye. The Armie Hammer character is a fascinating enigma. The movie forces you to not only think about the migrant but about yourself.
Boll’s movie has launched a worldwide conversation. Above all, though, what Citizen Vigilante exposes is real-life horror that the cowards in the entertainment business actively cover up as craven politicians benefit from the misery of their own citizens.
Uwe Boll has nothing to apologize for. Only simple-minded reactionaries and dishonest partisans see the movie as amoral, when it’s quite the opposite. My review is here.
One final point: Citizen Vigilante is why alternative media is so important. Without the digital revolution, Boll might not have found enough money to make his movie. Without social media, no one would know the movie existed. It would have been deliberately buried forever by the entertainment and media establishment. Without the internet, it would have received zero distribution or publicity.