3 hours ago
7
Oh, Armie Hammer! Has it come to this? It doesn’t seem that long since you were in the Oscar-winning film Call Me By Your Name giving a sensitive liberal performance opposite Timothée Chalamet. Now here you are, striding around the streets and public parks of Zagreb, shooting Muslims, tasering teens and topping complicit deep-state judges to protest against what your character robustly describes as an “unfriendly takeover by Islamist extremists and the blind-sided woke left”.
Much has happened to this once garlanded actor and great-grandson of oil tycoon Armand Hammer. His reputation plummeted after allegations of sexual assault by former partners in 2021, relationships that Hammer has maintained were consensual. Criminal charges were since dropped for lack of evidence, Hammer has now returned to the silver screen – and here he is in a very cheap, incoherent and embarrassingly badly acted schlocker, written, produced and directed by Germany’s low-budget exploitation maestro Uwe Boll, which cannibalises all manner of revenge tropes. More importantly, the film has been promoted and publicised globally online with monumental hypocrisy by Elon Musk who like JD Vance is very keen to divert America’s attention from its own issues to the fiercely imagined lawless migrant-caliphate of Europe-stan. It’s another piece of shit to flood the zone.
Hammer plays Sanders, an American ex-soldier who has taken over his late father’s property empire in Croatia. He is enraged by the way migrants are raping and murdering there. So using his colossal cache of weaponry he sets out to kill them all, most especially a set of gang-rapists – along with the whiny progressives in the judiciary who are letting them get away with it. He also sets out to kill many uniformed police officers, whose sin seems merely to be wanting to arrest him. He posts videos of himself ranting on the subject, and we get the traditional montage of people on social media all over the world saying how great he is.
Citizen Vigilante perhaps wants to be Michael Winner’s Death Wish or Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry or even Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. But these were films with, variously, measures of passion, style, wit, purpose, vision and competent production values. They employed actors who knew how to do the job of acting. And crucially, they were about America, not this wokester-piñata of Europe. If Boll and Musk want to make and promote make a film about an establishment stitch-up, then why not a hard-hitting film about the relationship of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump? Meanwhile it’s time for Hammer to return to the trade he followed before this: selling timeshares in the Cayman Islands.
