Whether it’s his grating appearance in Iron Man 2 or his killing hundreds of thousands of people with USAID cuts, Elon Musk has the unerring knack of being a prick. It’s almost impressive how relentlessly awful he’s become.
Whether he’s stomping Twitter to death in the same way Edward Norton’s Nazi curb-stomped a black man in American History X, or sieg-heiling on stage and waving chainsaws around, it’s bizarre how on the one hand the sometime trillionaire holds tremendous power and on the other he’s so transparently a dork who no one loves and everyone wants to die. He’s so despicable that even his own toddler punched him in the face.
His sense of humour is made up of pointless puns – “let that sink in”, he guffawed while carrying a sink into Twitter (soon to be X) HQ – and a mindless trolling that makes frat-boys look like Oscar Wilde. Shame on Walter Isaacson, having written biographies of Leonardo di Vinci, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, for turning to this phony pillock as a subject.
So, Musk is a cock. So what? Well, the other day he came to my manor – cinema – by offering X users a free download of Uwe Boll’s new film Citizen Vigilante. The film stars creepy perv Armie Hammer as a mix of Charles Bronson and Anders Breivik, who kills migrant criminals while monologuing like a talk radio host about the failures of the elites.
The famously non-elite Musk celebrated the film and posted a link for a free download, after Germany withheld an age rating to the film that effectively stopped its release there. Now Citizen Vigilant is topping streaming charts and is getting review-bombed by far right groups on Rotten Tomatoes to give it a 94% rating.
If you don’t know Herr Boll’s oeuvre, just be aware that his ratings rarely break above 20% and the word most used in reviews is “inept.” A charmless provocateur, Boll revels in his own crapness and once challenged his critics to a boxing match.
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One of the critics he challenged was Roger Avery, co-writer of Pulp Fiction, who is now on the Boll-train. Admittedly, Avery’s career has taken a dive since he was jailed for killing someone in a car accident while drunk, but he’s now doing okay, appearing on Joe Rogan and making faith-based AI films. Avery X-ed a rhetorical question: asking if Boll is “the boldest and bravest auteur working today?” The answer, you will be unsurprised to hear, is no.
The film is shit. Let’s just get that out of the way. And I don’t mean shit because it’s racist or I don’t agree with the opinions spouted in it, or that it’s crap in a tacky Grindhouse sort of way, or even ironically camp and so bad it’s good. It’s shit the way the shit that comes out of your arse and into the toilet is shit. Musk giving this film away for free is as generous as the Aum Shinrikyo cult giving away Sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995.
The film is set in EUROPE, where everyone speaks Euro-English and the Euro-newsreader gives exposition with all the breathless urgency of Peter O’Hanraha-hanrahan of The Day Today. Apparently, rapes and murders in Europeland are so endemic that women and girls can’t leave their houses at night for fear of migrants.
So a lovely blonde mum gets stabbed in the neck in broad daylight by a black man (presumably a migrant) with a machete. A 14-year old girl is gang-raped and the migrant rapists get off because the judge says the local community hasn’t done enough to help them integrate. A bunch of migrant kids get on the bus and don’t pay for their bus tickets. Oh, the humanity!
Meanwhile, Hammer is Michael Sanders, a wealthy landlord who spends his time loading weapons endlessly, doing fitness routines and wearing black polo-necks. He sends scrambled video messages to the socials about how miffed he is that foreigners are taking over the country. Obviously, being American in Europe doesn’t count as foreign because he’s… you know… white.
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Sanders hasn’t an ounce of humour, or interest in anyone else – except for turning up at the houses and hospital beds of victims to grumpily demand they give him permission to seek out justice. It’s as if The Equalizer were to start cold-calling: “Got any vengeance needs doing? You sure?”
Hammer, once a promising actor, now seems unable to blink convincingly. He drones on in the self-satisfied voice of the constantly complaining American tourist. He’s the psychopathic flipside of all those TikToks of Americans despairing about European restaurants not serving you iced water immediately.
He sits down with the fare-dodgers and talks to them about how if someone steals a banana, we all have to pay more for bananas. “It’s not fair,” he says. Alright Karen.
According to Boll, Citizen Vigilante’s budget was $2 million, which can only be explained by some hefty lunches, because what’s on the screen looks cheap. Drone shots of two armoured cars, by far the most expensive element visible, go on for what appears to be days, presumably to get their money’s worth.
So it’s shit. Yes. And it’s right wing and racist. Also yes. Will it cause more violence? Possibly.
But banning it was a dumb move which has backfired. Now it looks like Musk will happily finance a sequel, and maybe Tommy Robinson will get a cameo. I’m sure he’s already entered the chat by the time you read this.
The thing is, though, Citizen Vigilante isn’t the problem. It’s Eurotrash cinema which – without Musk’s intervention – would’ve drowned in the thumbnails of a thousand straight-to-streaming films. This is not the first film to stir moral panic and it won’t be the last. It’s likely that it’s the worst, though.
In the 1970s , a whole swathe of films took a self-serving cynical view of a society it identified as decadent and posited the solution to be a white man with a big gun. Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Joe, and Taxi Driver all feature racists shooting characters of colour with the implicit justification of frontier justice and a cheering audience.
More recently, such racism has had to be toned down or redirected. Liam Neeson goes after the Eastern European Mafia in Taken; Keanu Reeves and Bob Odenkirk go after the Russian Mafia in John Wick and Nobody respectively. The cartels get a shoeing in Colombiana, Sicario, Man on Fire and Sicario: The Day of the Soldado. Kevin Bacon takes on local gangs in Death Sentence and Gerard Butler takes the law into his own hands in Law Abiding Citizen.
The violent revenge fantasy requires the dehumanisation of entire sections of society. Hollywood has been doing this since it was called Hollywoodland, and glorifying the genocide of the Native Americans. In a literal version of the adage “a liberal is just a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet,” actors like Jodie Foster in The Brave One will happily off a bunch of non-white people when licensed to by imaginary trauma.
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Extra-judicial killing is the cultural norm in American films; and violence, except for the initial inciting-incident crime, is usually without consequences. There’s usually a law-enforcement character who reluctantly pursues the vigilante and tacitly agrees with their motives if not their methods.
This is why the bombing of fishing boats by the US military in Operation Southern Spear has been met with such apathy in the US. The public have been buttered up by Hollywood to accept this sort of violence as entirely legitimate because the very idea of “legitimacy” is suspect. It’s one of those namby-pamby lawyer words. Legality is a technicality that John Vernon’s mayor in Dirty Harry might use against Clint Eastwood, and we all know whose side we’re on.
I feel a bit conflicted because I do enjoy Dirty Harry films and vengeance narratives generally. What’s Hamlet after all? But it’s healthy to look at the nature of our enjoyments and wonder how they’ve been manipulated.
Every film posits a universe that the film exists in: which is what makes almost every film, no matter how escapist it seems, political. From Dirty Harry to Citizen Vengeance, revenge narratives posit a society where violence, murder and rape are constant and frequent dangers; the legal system is corrupt and benefits the guilty criminal over the victim; liberalism as in multiculturalism, feminism, gay rights and human rights generally force changes on society leading to decadence.
If there are journalists, they are exploitative and unscrupulous. Democracy has failed; violent individuals (usually white men) are the answer.
This, dear reader, is fascism.
Uwe Boll’s film is crap, but if our objections are about its politics, then we need to cast the net much wider.
John Bleasdale’s novel Connery is published by Plumeria
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