Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere explains to his readers why he backed out of interviewing notorious filmmaker and gadfly, Uwe Boll, for his new film, Citizen Vigilante. I understand why, because in this climate, you can’t even lightly criticize anything that the Left deems sacred, and at the top of that list, right now, are the plight of what they call on the Right, illegal aliens, and what they call on the Left, simply, undocumented immigrants.

It’s a touchy subject and low-hanging fruit for the perpetually outraged. I was intrigued for a different reason. I no longer want or desire to be protected and coddled by artists. I don’t want them to tell me what to think or lie to me. Not anymore. Not after years and years of it, not after an industry that has decided half the country is toxic waste because they do not agree with them about every single issue.

Citizen Vigilante centers around a successful businessman (Armie Hammer) who could be defined as the Greatest Evil The World Has Ever Known by the Left, and if any of them watch this film, that is exactly what they would conclude. But it’s a great performance anyway, Hammer’s best. Partly it’s that he has no more fucks to give and thus, doesn’t need to impress anyone, so he mostly goes for broke to depict a man who believes that there is no other way to manage rampant crime — but also because of how he’s filmed by Boll, tracked almost like a predator in many of the scenes, not given much empathy or humanity.

We’ve seen vigilante movies in the past, but those were all made in a different time, before Hollywood demanded and mandated we all think exactly the same way. How boring that has made art and movies. Why even bother going to see anything if it doesn’t at least challenge you or make you uncomfortable? The Left’s version of that is exploratory sex movies — and even that has been becoming mind-numbingly predictable.

His violence escalates as the film unfurls with gorilla-style filmmaking, which makes you feel like you’re walking in Armie Hammer’s shoes, which can be unsettling at times, especially toward the end when the character has crossed over from vigilante to a different kind of killer. It shows how anger, revenge, and power ultimately kill innocents, too, not just the guilty.

Inside the Left’s Doomsday Cult, and as depicted in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar sweeper, One Battle After Another, ICE is the Gestapo and the migrants are the Jews being hauled off to concentration camps. They believe this with a passion, so much so that they are willing to put their lives on the line to go to war with the Feds, which puts them in the line of fire. A tragedy that never should have happened, but the way to negotiate the policies with migrants is to put it to a vote. They did, and the Left lost.

Why? Because most working-class Americans – not the elite who run Hollywood — are worried about mass migration. There is no other way to say it. They’re worried about the criminals who came here to hide from their own government, and they’re worried about jobs. They’re worried about massive cultural changes they aren’t ready for. But you can’t have this conversation on the Left. You will be called a racist. So people are put in a position where they feel frustrated and stuck, which is why many of them voted for Trump, handing him the popular vote in 2024.

This story never gets told from the other side. It is mandated in Hollywood that all immigrants be depicted as noble and saintly, so to imagine any of them raping or stabbing citizens runs counter to the worldview of the utopians. No one will talk about it and so nothing is ever done to address it.

We hear many stories told from the other side, like One Battle After Another, but what we get from Hollywood is more of the same: their politics infused into propaganda disguised as politics, without ever getting the whole story or even a part of it. Movies like this are our future. They are films no one will see, but that satisfy the aristocracy who run Hollywood. Sean Penn lives in that fantasy world. They all do because they’ve successfully silenced all criticism and dissent.

The awards race props it all up. I’m sure Sean Penn’s terrible film will do very well with the awards because they want to validate their own worldview and use gold statues to do that. What they don’t do is reward any kind of challenging material that runs counter to it.

Citizen Vigilante is what we once called “dangerous art.” It’s provocative, sometimes painful, but always leaves you wondering what will happen next. It is one of those movies, like American Psycho, Dirty Harry, or Straw Dogs. To the Left, it will be slapped down as an incitement to kill undocumented workers. The funny thing about that, though, is that we don’t see a lot of violence against them in this country or even in Europe, where threats of violence against migrants are rising.

But the violence flows freely from the Left, attacks against Trump supporters out of the imagined violence that never came. It goes on and on, with assassination attempts – all as a means of societal control. Do what we want or else.

The story can only go in one direction. But no one will have the courage to write this story, for instance:

So here we are caught in this continual loop where only one side of the story is ever heard – because people are simply too afraid of career ruination, and they should be afraid. You can be chewed up and spit out by Hollywood, as Armie Hammer was.

He talks about it in this interview in The Hollywood Reporter — mildly shocking they would publish it all, and good on them for doing so:

He is more or less falling on his sword, taking responsibility, etc. But when they decide they’re done with you, they’re done with you. There is no forgiveness to be had because everyone inside Woketopia is disposable. They have all the power, and they’re abusing it again and again at the audience’s expense. Are we better off without Armie Hammer in movies? No. We are not.

Enter Uwe Boll, a guy who doesn’t care what people think of him and is brave enough to tear through the pretense like a hot knife through butter. In a sense, he is the vigilante here, daring to depict what can never be depicted. He is notorious for having gone to battle with film critics and made the film he wanted to make, and pulled no punches in doing so.

I found myself engaged from start to finish and was never bored. Dangerous art, provocative cinema is when you don’t know what will happen from one scene to the next. I don’t think it’s a film that will comfort anyone and will upset many. I don’t think it’s a movie that advocates for violence, though it will be written as such. There’s not much more they can do to Uwe Boll, and he wouldn’t care if they tried. That’s the spirit we need in Hollywood. We need people who are fearless. There aren’t many of those. They’re too rich. They’re too comfortable. They’re too scared.

Citizen Vigilante is controversial. You will feel uncomfortable watching it, and your head will be full of questions. What does this mean? What is the filmmaker saying? What is Armie Hammer doing? Is he killing the bad people? Yes. Does he sometimes kill people who did nothing? Also yes.

Most film critics will write it off as an offensive, dangerous agitprop, right-wing Trumpism film. I think it’s more than that because of the culture of silence and climate of fear on the Left and throughout the film industry. They have mostly killed off art and have replaced it with mind-numbingly boring propaganda. Even Sean Penn, who pretends to be above appearing at the Oscars, plays along. He sees himself as “important.” They all do.

These are people and a community that attained all of the power in America. Once they won their Oscars, made their money, tinkered with the utopian diorama, and got it just right, Trump came along and kicked it all down. Ever since, they’ve been fighting a Civil War to get it back, and art has become one of the casualties of that war.

So Citizen Vigilante dares to depict the point of view of the other side, you know, the people you all think are racists? It isn’t a racist film because there are a variety of people depicted as criminals, but it does make the point that unchecked migration and the rise in rapes in Europe are related, and if the government doesn’t do anything about it, it might start to inspire vigilante justice.

We’ve seen shooters inspired by films like The Dark Knight, Joker, or Taxi Driver. Should these films be banned? Should we then censor art, or should we let people see it for themselves? Funnily enough, we never needed policing of art because the entire Left has built a system that does it anyway with full support of the citizenry.

Armie Hammer and Uwe Boll did an interview with Film Threat’s Chris Gore and Alan Ng:

The best directors use their actors well. Boll knows how to film Armie Hammer and to give us everything about him that makes him so compelling on screen: closeups, full-length shots, how he walks, how he moves, how he shoots, how he has sex. It is a character study of a guy who seems to exist more as a collective sentiment rather than as a real person in the world.

I know that Boll will get a lot of grief for this film. It’s already started. But I found the film to be interesting and compelling and most importantly, not safe. Some of the best art, the most memorable, is art that flirts with the line, A Clockwork Orange. Citizen Vigilante is a film you really have to see for yourself and decide how you feel about it.

Here is my interview with Uwe Boll: