Citizen Vigilante: I don’t buy Armie Hammer’s attempt to distance himself from Uwe Boll’s movie.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
In an article published on Puck news on Tuesday, Kim Masters reported that actor Armie Hammer is not feeling great about the new fame he’s accumulating after appearing in Uwe Boll’s bloody anti-migrant film Citizen Vigilante. An unnamed “source in Hammer’s camp” said that the actor was “in tears” when he viewed the movie, his first project since he was accused by multiple women of sexual and emotional abuse, and subsequently dropped by his talent agency. (Hammer has denied these allegations.)
“He called me,” the source told Masters, “and said, ‘Fuck. This is hateful, disgusting.’ ” The “hateful” film surged from low-level notoriety to right-wing glorification when Elon Musk personally shilled for it a week after its June release, boosting X users’ gleeful celebrations of its hyperviolence and eventually posting the film in full on his platform for a two-day period. After that, like-minded (or curious) viewers pushed Boll’s movie to No. 1 on Amazon and Apple.
Rebecca Onion
A Canceled Star Is Back. His Hateful New Movie Is One of the Most Disturbing Things I’ve Seen Lately.
Read More
Boll, a filmmaker and provocateur known for largely awful and unprofitable movies, has leaned in, appearing on right-wing podcasts to capitalize on these 15 minutes of fame. But Hammer has to have realized that the movie clip that’s circulated most widely—the climax of the movie, in which Hammer’s character, an American veteran named Sanders, methodically murders 10 Syrian refugees in a family’s apartment—is being shared as proto-fascist propaganda by the worst people in the world. As a comeback for a canceled actor, Citizen Vigilante leaves a lot to be desired, even for a purported paycheck of $250,000.
The Hammer insider told Masters that Hammer probably “knew the movie leaned toward the right” but didn’t know the extent of it, due to Boll’s quick-and-dirty way of filmmaking—indeed, in the Hollywood Reporter’s interview with Hammer that ran before Citizen Vigilante came out, the actor said he only got a 50-page script before the shoot began. Here’s the benefit of the doubt: Some of Sanders’ monologues, delivered to camera for social media or to unwilling teens on a bus, could just be the words of a crank who loves Nietzsche and hates shoplifters. These little libertarian lectures sound weird enough that maybe Hammer thought Boll was just trying to write a character, and he leaned in, giving Sanders that odd monotone delivery he maintains throughout the movie.
Some egregious scenes without Sanders in them could have been added later—maybe Hammer didn’t know that the movie would start with the camera following a blond mom and her kid out of a grocery store, then watching the mom get stabbed in the neck by a migrant, or that in the aftermath of the scene where Sanders murders a dozen cops from inside a fortified box, the camera would pan over the dead bodies while weirdly jaunty Muzak plays. Maybe Hammer didn’t know that the fake social media posts and news broadcasts threaded into the narrative would be so flagrant (“We work and pay taxes, to help all of Africa?” one “woman-on-the-street” interviewee responds to a correspondent covering Sanders’ rampage), or that the movie would end with a title card dedicating the movie to the “thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system.”
But Hammer absolutely had to know that his character Sanders shows up at the doorstep of a young Syrian migrant who raped a girl and was let off by a sympathetic judge, shoots him in the leg, lines him and his family up on a couch, and interrogates them. Hammer had to know— because he delivered the lines—that Sanders asks the father what he teaches his children, then lectures him: “If these are your values, that women in America and Europe deserve to be raped because of a dress code, why did you come here? I don’t think it was the good ones that got out of your country. I think it was the bad ones. And I think you brought with you your archaic value system and your commitment to religion over democracy and over anything else, including the rule of law.”
-
A Writer Was Accused of Cheating to Win a Prestigious Award. His Defense Has Only Made the Case Stranger.
-
The Original Movie Changed Documentary Filmmaking. Then the Director of Paul Blart: Mall Cop Wanted to Remake It.
Hammer had to know that Sanders shoots the boy’s sister for having posted on social media that the victim deserved it; the boy’s mom and dad for, I guess, having parented the two kids; and a string of six of the boy’s friends and fellow rapists who come into the apartment, giving the scene an almost comical sense of overkill as the bodies pile up. It’s small potatoes after what I just described, but it was also Hammer who read the lines Sanders delivers over the phone to the police officer who’s been trying to track him down: “The people never voted for what’s happening. This is an unfriendly takeover by the Islamist extremists and the blindsided woke left.”
Given all that, I’d bet Hammer was less upset by the shape of the final movie, and more thrown by the huge response to it on the right, which won’t make for a good springboard to the new career phase he’d probably hoped for. Masters mentions at the end of her Puck piece that a sequel to Citizen Vigilante is in the works, and the Hammer source said to her that he would reprise the role but only for “life-changing money.”
“Everyone has a breaking point,” the source said. It sure looks like it.
