Citizen Vigilante Movie Night (E381)

Summary

QAA Podcast – Episode 381: Citizen Vigilante Movie Night

Date: July 16, 2026
Hosts: Jake Rockatansky, Annie Kelly, Liv Agar, Brad Abrahams
(with mention of Julian Feeld & Travis View)

---

Episode Overview

This episode tackles the viral and highly controversial film Citizen Vigilante by infamous director Uwe Boll. The QAA team watches and deconstructs the movie, discusses its right-wing reception—including Elon Musk’s personal endorsement and streaming boost—dissects Boll’s career, and critically analyzes the politics, filmmaking, and cultural impact of both Citizen Vigilante and Boll’s oeuvre. The panel brings humor, skepticism, and historical context to an exceptionally dark, reactionary piece of media, serving both as a content warning for listeners and a deep-dive for those curious about the phenomenon.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why “Citizen Vigilante”? — [00:00–07:00]

• The team, assembled with an atypical “ensemble” of hosts, break down why they’re covering this “rough one,” admitting they’d prefer not to, but feel compelled because the film’s recent right-wing virality means people need real context and critique.
• Jake: “If this means we spare tens of thousands of you from doing the same [watching it], it’ll have been worth it.” (02:47)

2. The Uwe Boll Backstory — [07:04–14:55]

• Dr. Uwe Boll: Raised in Germany, with a tough, critical father and supportive mother. Not a “nepo baby;” failed to get into film school, got a doctorate in literature.
• Became a prolific director by leveraging a German tax law loophole (investors could write off losses); raised €150 million and churned out notorious video game adaptations.
• Video game IPs adapted: House of the Dead (3% RT score), Alone in the Dark (1% RT, dogged for nonsensical departure from games), BloodRayne (star-studded, a financial flop), Postal (most “faithful” to game’s nihilistic violence), In the Name of the King (with Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, and more).
• Boll earned a reputation for “so-bad-they’re-bad,” production-line-level filmmaking, still managing to attract big names.
• Notable quote: “If he was just a producer on an indie film, maybe he could have had a functionally respected career.” (14:29, Brad)

3. Boll vs. the Critics: Boxing Matches & Culture Wars — [30:55–35:00]

• In response to critics, Boll challenged several to actual boxing matches (and destroyed them all, being a trained amateur boxer).
• Online petitions begged for him to stop making films; he trolled back, claiming “genius” compared to “idiots” like Michael Bay.
• As legislation changed, his gravy train ended; he attempted a “fine dining” backup career in Vancouver, quickly clashing with the city’s liberal and homeless policies.

4. Boll’s Politics: Shift from Leftist to Reactionary? — [39:40–41:46]

• Earlier films and statements suggested a leftist bent (made a Darfur film, bashed Wall Street, claimed to support Bernie Sanders).
• Now, he claims: “Traditionally, I’m not a right-wing person at all, but when something goes completely wrong, I point it out.” (41:46)
• He states Citizen Vigilante was inspired by high-profile rape cases in Germany that, in his view, received “lenient” sentences due to migrant youth offenders. The hosts point out that German law is about juvenile rehabilitation, not “wokeness,” and that the cases cited involved both German nationals and migrants.
  • Annie: “There is a tendency ... to frame these lenient sentences as ‘woke policies’ but it’s actually based on decades of criminological research.” (43:34)

5. Armie Hammer & the Canceled Comeback — [43:34–47:49]

• Hammer, whose career collapsed after abuse and “cannibalism” allegations, took the part after getting a direct email offer—his first in years.
• He describes being thrilled to act again; calls the script “amazing.” The hosts find it notable that his “vigilante fantasy” comments seem uncomfortably close to his own accusations and history.
  • Hammer: “Every single one of us has been wronged ... probably not a good idea to [enact vigilante fantasies] in real life, but getting to do it for a couple weeks ... was a lot of fun.” (47:52)

6. The Making (and Absurdities) of Citizen Vigilante — [51:25–54:07]

• Shot for ~$2 million in Croatia (chosen for its “generic whiteness”—thematically ironic for an anti-immigrant narrative).
• 15 day shoot, run-and-gun style, abysmal color grading, heavy drone and recycled shots, “crunchy audio.”
• Script was originally titled “The Dark Knight” (prompting a Warner Bros. cease & desist).
• Hammer’s character written as a “black and white, on the spectrum” antihero, obsessed with rules but a literal landlord who owns brothels—a bizarre facsimile of Batman through a right-wing lens.
• The movie’s opening: A white mother is killed by a brown assailant in the most racist, on-the-nose fashion, setting the tone for nonstop hate.

7. Monologues, Violence, and Right-Wing Wish Fulfillment — [54:08–92:00]

• Main character Sanders gives endless, wooden camcorder monologues about justice and the system; delivers “centrist fascist” rhetoric critiquing both “elites” and migrants.

  • Memorable line (epigraph): “All behavior traces to instinct. And when justice is denied, instinct turns to vengeance.” (53:57, attrib. “Anonymous”)

• Film’s “action:” Montage of the protagonist massacring criminals (coded as migrants), brutal vigilante showdowns, beatdowns of teenagers, Interpol (“SWAT” teams) annihilation.

• Sanders’ backstory: A hands-on landlord, self-satisfied, lecturing about rent collection and evictions, owns 3,500 units; owns a brothel.

  • Sanders: “10% of that is €5,040,000 that people are stealing from me. Evict them immediately.” (70:17)
  • Annie: “There isn’t a scene where Robin Hood talks about evicting tenants who are behind on the rent … he’s fighting those guys!” (70:35)

• Armie’s character channels “autistic justice” (by his own admission), but the hosts skewer the performance as wooden and absurd.

8. The Plot’s (and Boll’s) Political Program — [91:00–95:08]

• The movie climaxes in family annihilation: Sanders executes an entire migrant family, based on the real “Hamburg rape cases” cited by Boll (although in reality, the actual cases involved juvenile law for both German and migrant youth).
• The film ends with a monologue inciting copycat vigilantism, with a dedication “to the thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe betrayed by the legal system.” (95:13)
• The viewer is invited to identify with the “vigilante,” but the panel calls the film “one of the ugliest and most miserable” scenes they’ve ever seen.

9. Reception, Chud Media, & Elon Musk’s Endorsement — [96:00–101:12]

• The German ratings board initially refused to certify the film, keeping it off retail and mainstream streaming services, which reactionary boosters spun as a “ban.”
• Boll begged pirates to PayPal him €7-10 after Musk streamed the film to millions on X (formerly Twitter).
• Critics panned the film (6% Rotten Tomatoes), but audience scores on RT—likely astroturfed by its right-wing fanbase—soar (92%).
  • Critic Josh Lewis: “Heartwarming. Bald German idiot has 30-year moviemaking career despite never learning to compose or edit a frame. Be more demanding of your evil filmmakers. Have standards.” (98:04)
• Elon Musk signals interest in funding a sequel (“Citizen Vigilante 2: End of Somali Scam”) and “based film festivals.”
• Reactionaries and online personalities (Libs of TikTok, Jack Posobiec, etc.) join the chorus.

10. Meta-Satire or Reactionary Trash? Alternate Interpretations — [103:04–104:55]

• Some suggest the landlord brothel-owner plot is a “satirical” tell; at the very least, the film’s protagonist is clearly written as a sociopath—and even most right-wingers can barely defend the movie on artistic grounds.
• Rebecca Onion (Slate): “Some anti-migrant film fans who actually watch Citizen Vigilante may find themselves a little underwhelmed by how few asylum seekers die in the film. In the rest of the movie, Sanders actually mostly kills cops … which turns off some right wing viewers.” (103:28)
• A reported quote from Hammer: “When he saw the final product, he was, ‘That was not the movie I thought we made,’ and he freaked the fuck out.” (104:08)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [01:31] Jake: “Elon Musk has quote tweeted it... If he’d watched this movie, he would be embarrassed to endorse it.”
• [17:54] Liv (mocking review): “Dr. Bol was able to hire his loyal team of hacks to crank out something much better than our crappy story... and a ten minute opening backstory scroll read aloud to the illiterate audience.”
• [33:12] Jake (on critics boxing): “A human being getting to live out all our fantasies. We’ve all had this fantasy ... They didn’t know you came to fucking fight and you beat the shit out of them.”
• [43:58] Annie (on criminal justice): “Often what’s happening with juvenile offenders is just... what the research has pointed for decades… often what leads to these quite confusing and shocking sentences.”
• [70:35] Annie: “There isn’t a scene where Robin Hood talks about evicting tenants who are behind on the rent.”
• [88:30] Liv: “Uwe Boll is about to discover honor killings from first principle, and say that they’re good.”
• [97:28] Liv (Bulwark review): “The problem with Citizen Vigilante is not that it’s rancid fascist dogshit—worse than that, it’s incompetently made dogshit.”
• [98:39] “Audience” review: “Not a great movie, but an excellent guide to our future. I’d recommend this movie to everyone. Everyone.”

---

Important Segments with Timestamps

• [07:04–30:55] — History of Uwe Boll’s career & German tax loophole
• [30:55–35:14] — Boll boxes his critics (“Raging Boll”)
• [39:40–43:34] — Boll’s politics: leftist-to-reactionary journey
• [43:34–47:49] — Armie Hammer “cancellation” & casting
• [51:25–54:07] — The “making” of Citizen Vigilante
• [54:08–92:00] — In-depth plot walkthrough, scene critiques, and live reactions
• [95:08–97:36] — Finale, on-screen dedication, reception, and Rotten Tomatoes drama
• [99:15–101:12] — Musk & right-wing online response, plans for a “based” film world
• [103:04–104:55] — Questions of whether film is satire and Hammer’s regret

---

Tone and Language

• Humor and exasperation: Hosts are clearly exasperated (“this movie sucks”), but use comedy to carry listeners through extremely dark and hateful material.
• Critical and historical: Provide substantial background on Boll, film politics, and audience manipulation by opportunists like Musk.
• Skeptically empathetic: Openly worry about the rise of right-wing media ecosystems but engage each other with warmth and insight.

---

Final Takeaways

• The QAA team regards Citizen Vigilante as both a disturbing piece of racist, reactionary propaganda and an incompetent, amateurish movie, propped up by right-wing grievance merchants online.
• The hype, streaming, and attention—particularly from figures like Musk—expose the creation of a parallel “based” cinema designed to outrage and energize a reactionary base, not to create art or advance discourse.
• While Citizen Vigilante may be a (briefly) viral artifact, the episode cautions listeners against giving it undue cultural power, and instead encourages nuanced, historically grounded criticism.

---

For Those Who Haven’t Listened

This episode offers a painstaking, sometimes hilarious, sometimes grim tour through a highly controversial film and its cultural fallout. The hosts dissect not only the product, but the political, technological, and psychological machinery that allowed it to become a talking point. Their deconstruction, grounded in personal anecdotes, cultural history, and biting analysis, makes clear why Citizen Vigilante is not just “so bad it’s good” but “so bad it’s dangerous”—and why it’s important to look closely at the mechanisms that bring such films to prominence.

---

End-of-Episode Notes

• Community Comments: Annie Kelly announces her maternity leave, with warm encouragement from the crew.
• Plugs: Hosts share where to find their work.
• Closing Line: “May the deep dish bless you and keep you.”

Transcript

[A]

Sam, if you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the Internet. Welcome to the qaa podcast. Episode 381, Citizen Vigilante Movie night. As always, we are your hosts, Jake

[B]

Rockatansky, Ani Kelly, Liv Aycar, and Brad Abrahams.

[A]

Oh, yeah. This is a crazy ensemble. Have we ever had this ensemble on the show? This particular config?

[C]

I don't think so. It's really a case of needing to assemble a team.

[A]

Yeah, we've got two non American ladies and we've got the two American Jews.

[B]

I'm Canadian, I was going to say.

[A]

Oh, yeah, that's true. Just because you live here doesn't mean you have to be here spiritually. So that's. That makes sense.

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Tweeted, Breaking Citizen Vigilante has now hit number one on Amazon in the United States. The film the establishment doesn't want people to see has gone viral. American flag emoji.

[A]

And Elon Musk has, quote, tweeted it and he writes, this is what the people want to see. Which again, Elon has now showed his whole ass. Because if he had watched this movie, he would be embarrassed to endorse it. I think no matter what your politics is, this is a bad movie on any and all fronts.

[B]

Yeah. And the reason that this film, Citizen Vigilante, hit number one on Amazon and number two on Apple TV is precisely because Elon Musk has been boosting it for a full week, going as far as to share the film in its entirety to his 240 million followers streaming on the platform that he controls. So if it weren't for him and a bunch of other high profile right wingers having a fit of ecstasy over it, your embattled hosts likely would not be presenting this episode to you.

[A]

He's streaming this movie live on Twitter.

[B]

He did? Yeah. For 48 hours.

[D]

I'd be pretty mad. Oh, my God.

[B]

Well, he got permission to.

[D]

I see.

[E]

Okay.

[D]

Okay, so.

[B]

So here we are in. Yeesh. Like, this was a rough one. And I think as much as we all love watching and covering movies that are so bad they're good for the pod, we'd really rather not be giving our precious seconds on this prison planet to Citizen Vigilante. But if this means we spare tens of thousands of you from doing the same, it'll have been worth it.

[A]

Yes, Please, please, we must do this service and save you. My wife had headphones on. She was playing Stardew Valley on Switch. She had no audio sense. Like, no aud Visual senses. Except for the game. And like, she glanced up like, three minutes into the movie, took her headphones off and was like, this looks bad. She was like, this is what you have to watch for work. And I'm like, yeah. She goes, this looks real bad for work. And she was like, oh, is that Armie Hammer? And I was like, yeah. She goes, he's in this. Somebody cast him in a movie. And I was like, well, well, movie is generous. Is a generous term here.

[D]

It's really the biggest piece of shit.

[C]

Yeah, I believe. Well, I think, Brad, you went above and beyond because you were telling me just before we started record, you were actually watching this in public, of all places.

[B]

Yeah. Yes. So I was like, trying to make the best use of my time. And it didn't really. I didn't need to give it justice by, like, watching it on, like, a nice TV or a sound system. So I watched it on the airplane on my laptop. And like, very soon into watching, I was slowly inching my computer screen away from anyone being able to see it until I could only see, like, a corner of the screen shaking my head

[D]

when I watched Jason's original anime.

[B]

So everyone knows, I don't know, that I hate it.

[C]

Yeah. That is like, the worst part of this job, I feel. I remember once when I was doing my PhD, I was in the university library and I was listening to a speech. Richard Spencer speech on headphones, obviously. But, like, it was the nightmare scenario. Literally the headphones just stopped working and it started blaring out of my laptop and, like, the whole laptop froze. And I've never, like, oh, my God. I've never panicked so much in my life. Like, I was pressing everything. I was like, trying to slam it shut.

[D]

It still was going write it at that point.

[B]

Amazing.

[D]

Just sits at the table.

[A]

That's crazy.

[C]

I just wanted to scream, like, more like, this is what I'm studying. I promise. This is like a research thing. I don't agree with any of this.

[A]

It's crazy that there was like a Nazi like. Like library ghost that was there. That was like, ah, I must interfere with the computer so the whole library can hear these beautiful words. That's so funny. I actually, like, pulled my blinds down.

[E]

There was.

[A]

There's like a horrible, like, long sex scene as I guess in all Uwe bowl movies. But like this one particularly, there's like a very long sex scene with like, like a sex worker. And it was so gratuitous and weird and bad that I like. I like, got up and closed my blinds Because I was embarrassed if, like, somebody walked by with their dog or their kid or whatever, that they would look through our window and just see, like, neon. Like neon fake titties, like, glistening, like, you know, like. Because everything is bathed in, like, weird sort of like Grand Theft Auto lighting scheme.

[C]

Yeah. And you're right, it is, like, three times too long as well.

[B]

Yeah. Every scene.

[A]

Yeah, every scene. So many edits. A hundred edits. To show me, like, picking up a piece of paper or, like, loading his guns takes like an hour and a half.

[D]

I don't think I've ever agreed with that meme where it's like, you know, the makers are pouring unnecessary sex scenes into the. Like. The analogy is like the coffee cup and it's overflowing. This was an unnecessary sex. Yeah.

[A]

I thought he was going to go in and, like, liberate the. I thought he was going to go do something kind of like Taken style. But then I noticed that the camera started being pervy and weird. It was going to his pov, like, checking out everybody's, like, ass and boobs. And I was like, what the fuck? And then he just goes, like, has sex with this woman. Oh, God, I'm sorry. We're getting ahead of this.

[B]

Yes, we'll cover. We'll cover that part.

[A]

We'll get it all. Yeah.

[B]

Yes. So before we get ahead of ourselves, in case you don't know, the film is about a vigilante taking quote, unquote, justice into his own hands by hunting down criminals which are really just brown migrants. And it's not just bad, but it's hateful. It's mean spirited, it's terribly written and amateurly directed, but the director behind it is a chaotic troll of the highest order. And this is why we're going to break the format of the traditional movie night app by talking more about the man than the film itself.

[E]

Raging Ball.

[B]

Dr. Uwe. That's how it's pronounced. Not U, E. Dr. Uwe Ball was born on June 22, 1965, in a small town in Germany's industrial northwest. He was no film Nepo baby. His father was a chemical technician and national handball champion, and by Ball's account, his earliest and harshest critic, constantly yelling profanities and calling him a waste of time and a fucking loser. So imagine, like, this is. This is what you get from your dad from day one, how this is gonna affect your development.

[A]

Oh, my God. Every scene is just him killing his father. Okay.

[B]

Pretty much.

[A]

Go on. Yes.

[B]

His mother. Ernie, though, was by all accounts a Delight and catered. His first movie, he said at six years old, he walked alone to the local Cinema and watched Dr. Zhivago, which is. There's something about like a six year old walking alone to the theater to watch like an almost four hour long movie, which is very strange to me, if true. And then he also watched the original Godzilla, which makes a little more sense. Those films plus seeing Mar Brando and Mutiny on the Bounty settled it. He would become a director. The film schools rejected him. An early start to his eternal outsider status.

[D]

I know another individual kind of like him who was rejected from a certain art school.

[C]

Yes,

[B]

another Germanic individual, you're right. Instead he studied business administration and literature and in 1994 was awarded a doctorate in literature. And where his doctor moniker comes from, his dissertation was a 130 page paper on television series called the genre of the series and its Genres.

[C]

Surely something's lost in translation there, yes?

[A]

Yeah, sure.

[B]

But how did a man with no connections, no film school degree and no certified bangers get to make over 40 feature films? Up until 2005, German tax law let private investors and film funds write up to 100% off their investment, immediately paying tax only on whatever the film earned. So for a wealthy German in a high bracket, a Ball movie was a tax play, even a total flop, of which most were cost almost nothing to them. So starting in 1999, Ball set up 10 of these funds, raising about 150 million euros, or roughly $160 million.

[A]

Through Genius.

[B]

Yeah. And who passed to take us through Ball's filmography in this period, which were mostly video game adaptations. Take it away, Jake.

[A]

Thank you, Brad. You know, it's funny that I'm in charge of the Uwe Boll video game adaptation section because I'm pretty sure I haven't seen any of these movies. Now look. Some of the early Resident Evil films, the Doom movie, Mortal Kombat 1 and 2. These were the video game adaptation films I had sought out in the early 2000s. I just didn't give a shit about Alone in the Dark, which at the time I knew was only a graphically impressive albeit, but too scary, too hard computer game that I'd played. Maybe a demo of, maybe a demo on a Mac World disc. I was like 10 years old when it came out for Mac, so. Too complicated. Did any of you ever play the OG Alone in the Dark? Brad? I feel like. No, no, no, no. None. Not on a computer. Your pops wasn't playing it?

[B]

No, I don't. I just. I don't remember it was like one

[A]

of the original like Polygon sort of like titles. It was when graphic. It was like I was used to seeing sprites and like pixel graphics and then it was like Polygon characters. And it was very impressive. But I wasn't playing it. I was playing Star Wars, Dark Forces, Marathon, Durandal, Full Throttle. Other lucasarts titles. Maybe a little Dig, maybe a little Monkey Island. But I digress. Despite having seen none of these movies, I don' One might have slipped through the One might have slipped through the cracks at a hotel or something I wrote because you never know what's on tv.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

I can say with confidence though that I have played most of the games that they are based on, which makes me uniquely qualified to lead you, dear listener, through a quick list of UWE's most famous gaming adaptations.

[E]

House of the Dead 2003 now, at

[A]

first I couldn't believe that somebody actually tried to make a movie out of the 1997 Sega light gun arcade game where you blow chunks out of zombies as well as these little wormy ghoulies. I'm sure people who played remember until they inevitably kill you. Which was always. I never got further than the first level, I don't think. Never had enough quarters. I remember House of the Dead having pretty good graphics at the time. The game apparently had an impact on Uwe as well because he actually cuts two footage of the game during the movie Famous cemetery shootout.

[B]

Which is incredible because he like ran out of footage or something.

[A]

No, I think it's like a stylistic choice.

[B]

Okay, okay, okay.

[A]

So the plot of the film is as follows. A group of college age kids travel to an island to attend a massive rave. But when they get there, everyone is dead and the island has been overrun by Zekes. Bull introduces each character holding a various weapon with a 360 degree camera turntable. Think like OG bullet time. Apparently this is one of the last film to use the turntable because it was way too dangerous having a giant camera just swinging around 360 degrees. But they use this like gratuitously throughout the shootouts and it's actually. It looks great. I'm going to be. I'm going to be honest. This movie is probably the most gamey feeling I would say if that makes sense. It was universally hated by movie critics. Currently sitting at a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.

[B]

Which seems to be like the average score of.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. One to six percent for my guy. Which is like really impress.

[C]

Yeah, that is actually quite hard.

[B]

It really is.

[A]

Would Liv and Annie do you want to take Turns Reading these two reviews from 2003 when the film dropped?

[D]

Ken Fox from TV Guide gives it a 1.5 out of 5 and says, Lazy by even the low standards set by earlier video game adaptations like Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat.

[C]

And Dave Kerr for the New York Times gives it a one out of five and says, cutting around frantically in a vain attempt to stir up some energy. The director Uwe Boll drops an occ images from the video game itself as if he was subliminally trying to remind ticket buyers why they showed up in the first place.

[D]

Yeah, he really does seem like a person who, like, if he is given an artistic decision, will always make the wrong one. You can make a good film by doing the exact opposite of him, like, to the letter.

[A]

So this is actually insane by today's standards, given what sort of passes as like a sort of like indie kind of horror film budget nowadays. But House of the Dead was made for $12 million, which is, I think, a lot for a horror indie nowadays. It's especially after Obsession, which is like a massive, massive hit. It's like, okay, can you make your horror film for 750K? Because, like, that's what these guys did.

[B]

Yeah. And 12 million back then is like 20 million now.

[A]

It's insane.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And before that, before Obsession, it was like Paranormal Activity, they made for 11,000, the original. So it's like, hey, can you make your. Can you make your movie for this cheap? But this guy's got like 12 million to make. It's insane. He worked that tax loophole.

[D]

Oh, my God, I wish literally anyone else had found out the loophole other than him.

[A]

I was going to say, like, imagine if somebody truly, like, amazing filmmaker had found this.

[C]

Yeah. And didn't. Didn't he, like, ruin it for future generations?

[A]

Oh, no.

[B]

Yeah, I'm going to get into that. But I think, I think it speaks to, like, what he seems like he's good at is, is like financing, pre production development, like producing, and just terrible at writing and directing. I think if he was just a producer on an indie film, like, maybe he could have like, had a, you know, a functionally, like, respected career.

[A]

So this, this movie, though, actually ended up being one of his best successes. It made about a million dollars. It did like over 13 million at the box office. And Bol credits it with basically saying, like, well, this I'm gonna make more video game adaptations because this made a million dollars. Like, this made a million dollars. So, like, I, like, everybody zeroed out like we. I'm like, I'm just gonna keep doing this. And he did Alone in the dark 2005. How the hell. And I mean how the hell did he get Christian Slater to play in a video adaptation movie from To Me? Kind of a surprising video game title. You know, you guys said you never played the original Alone in the Dark, but it was like a proto Resident Evil, a fixed camera polygon art 3D survival horror. In fact, Guinness Book of World Records credits the devs inventing that genre. Crazy. From my memory, your character moved like really slow. It was really hard to aim. The original games were set in the 1920s and used a type of French boxing for the majority of the combat. Very difficult. So like, you know, to me, like a marathon Durandal movie, say, made a lot more sense. Even like a, you know, a Sam and Max movie or something made more sense. Why pick Alone in the Dark? It actually didn't matter because Uwe's movie took very little from the games themselves and instead served as an early indication of his level of pillagedness. Christian Slater plays Edward Carnby, a paranormal investigator connected to a secret government organization called Bureau 713. They're in charge of tracking down paranormal anomalies, uncovering ancient civilizations, and locating children who've gone missing. To show you how far he sort of like wandered from the source material, the game's original plot is about escaping a haunted mansion. The film did away with the game's slow, unnerving atmosphere in favor of lots of machine gun fire and shiny, happy, slithery CGI monsters. It has been considered generally to be one of the worst movies ever made, partially due to it making only roughly half of its budget back at the box office. The writer Blair Erickson claimed that the original script was a slow burning paranormal thriller that paid homage to the Lovecraftian vibes of the game game. But that Bol began sending email suggestion after email suggestion, slowly turning the movie into an action flick.

[C]

Thankfully, Dr. Bol was able to hire his loyal team of hacks to crank out something much better than our crappy story and added all sorts of terrifying horror movie essentials like opening gateways to alternate dimensions, bimbo blonde archaeologists, sex scenes, mad scientists, slimy dog monsters, special army forces designed to battle slimy CGI dog monsters. Tara Reid Matrix slow motion gun battles and car chases. Oh yeah, and a 10 minute opening backstory scroll read aloud to the illiterate audience.

[B]

10 minutes.

[C]

The only people able to successfully miss all the negative reviews. I mean, Hell Ball knows that's where the real scares lie.

[A]

Now there's a writer.

[C]

Yes, real like just venom just dripping off the screen there.

[A]

People widely mocked Tara Reid's performance in this movie as the museum curator, saying that she sounded too dumb to work at a museum. She's really mean. Also, there's a really gratuitous sex scene between Reid and Slater that Bull later ended up removing from the director's cut.

[B]

He removed it from the director's director's cut.

[A]

He like ended up remove like the director's cut. He ended up like taking out this like really weird sex scene. So maybe even he was like, I've gone too far. Alone in the Dark is currently sitting at 1% on Incredible.

[B]

Incredible.

[A]

Blood Rain 2005 When I saw the cast list for Blood Rain 2005, they made two sequels. My jaw nearly hit the the floor. Ben Kingsley, Sir Ben Kingsley. Michael Madsen, Michelle Rodriguez, Udo Kier, Billy Zane. Meatloaf. What the heck?

[B]

Meatloaf.

[A]

BloodRayne is a 2002 third person action game from the era of combining jack off material and guns and gore. You know what I mean? It's like the Lara Croft.

[D]

It was like sure before they made video games.

[A]

Woke it was when the devs were like I can turn these triangles into tits. And they did it on all their characters. You play as a half human, half vampire hunting Nazis as well as other non human creatures. The game had bad polygonal titties that the devs of course animated to bounce and lots of gratuitous ass shots during cutscenes. It's like Tomb Raider meets Legacy of Kain kind of, if that makes sense to anybody. Now Bol's movie serves as a prequel to the story of the game, which takes place in the late 30s, before World War II, I think. Now this is a title ripe for adaptation. You've got a hot half vampire blade master taking on Nazis circa Indiana Jones era. It's perfect for like a grindhouse style flick. Instead, this movie is about Rain escaping from a traveling circus and joining up with a group of vampire hunters so they can help her search for magical body parts that will help her defeat her father, the vampire lord. The screenwriter Guinevere Turner, also known for American Psycho, says that after she turned in her first draft, Uwe basically was like excellent, took the script, made a bunch of changes and then handed it over to his actors, encouraged them to make their own changes. She said like 20% of her script is in the movie and that a lot of it was written on location during during the Filming amazing. So the movie was widely panned and earned only $3.7 million at the box office towards its 25 million DOL budget, making it one of Bol's largest financial failures. He was criticized for hiring sex workers as extras for a scene where Meat Loaf plays a decadent vampire surrounded by a topless harem. Bolt claimed that this was cheaper than hiring actresses willing to perform topless. The theatrical release was also a major boondoggle, with theaters being shipped prints of the film when it had not been ordered. The mix up caused a number of theaters to end up not showing the movie, and Bol later sued Billy Zane, who had a hand in the distribution,

[D]

while

[A]

Michael Matson later called the film an abomination, but admitted he really liked Bol and wouldn't mind working with him again in the future.

[B]

Yeah, this actually, this is something that's pretty consistent, is like, cast and crew are like. It was actually like a fun time. Nothing went wrong on set. Everyone got paid. Like, again, he was like, good producer. He made sort of a good environment for the filming. But then the end result, obviously, obviously terrible.

[A]

You know, to me, I wish I hadn't heard that because that goes a really long way.

[B]

I know.

[A]

You know, this guy just wants to show up and put a squib on you. Like, that's what he wants to do. He's like, let's. He's like, let's fuck around with these squibs and like, see how much, like, realistic looking blood we can get. He's like, I've got an idea for one of the police officers during, like, the kill box scene. I want to blow his whole face off. Like, let's do that. Like, I can imagine as somebody who's worked on a handful of film sets, like, I can imagine a set like this would probably be pretty fun.

[D]

Fun.

[A]

Bull would go on to direct two more straight to DVD BloodRayne movies. Postal 2007 I cannot remember if the original Postal game had a story. It's an isometric shooter that was very controversial when I was a teenager with people saying it would make you, quote, go Columbine if you played it. Have any of you played the original Postal or any of the sequels?

[B]

No, I know about the first two, but never played.

[C]

Yeah, I'm not a gamer and I haven't heard of any of these games, but I have heard of this one. I think because of how controversial it was.

[A]

Now, I never owned this. I don't think. I don't think I had the balls to try to funnel that kind of violence into my family computer. My mom. If you're listening, be thankful because I know you would have had an aneurysm at this game. But I'm thinking maybe that the first level hit like a Mac World demo disc or something. I just, I included a picture here for the hosts.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Especially are you are younger hosts who didn't have to have demo discs delivered in magazines. This was what we fucking waited for. This was it. Look at this one. Best of the year. Over 50 power packed demos, trials and movies of the max. Best software of 1999. This was like I had months of content.

[D]

Maybe I was 98, baby. I was 1 years old when this came out. So I have no clue. This is a whole different world for me.

[A]

Postal the game, I played it, it made me feel bad inside. You wore a trench coat and shot at innocent people in suburban towns, neighborhoods, threw Molotov cocktails at marching bands. This was a lot more violent than the original GTAs. Some of your still alive victims would crawl away from you leaving a trail of blood. It was incredibly intense. The original game came out in 1997 and was developed by the company running with Scissors. The game is named after the phrase going postal, which I heard pretty frequently growing up after an incident in 1987 where a postal worker went on a shooting spree and killed 14 colleagues. So that was like how people said that you were crazy back then. They were like, oh, he's gonna go post John Personal.

[C]

Yeah. So is the game, are you actually just going on a shooting spree? Like, are you like a mass shooter basically?

[A]

You are a mass shooter, basically. And they had like execution animations. I remember like, if somebody was still alive on the ground, you could like go up to them and there was a specific animation to like blow the rest of their head off. It was like, I remember as a kid being like, ooh. Like, ooh, this is.

[B]

Ooh.

[A]

I don't know. I don't know. I think you just got like point. You're supposed to be killing like the police and the military that are coming after you now. Postal the movie, though directed by Uwe Boll, is probably the closest, I would say spiritually to the source material. It stars Zach Ward as the Postal dude, an unemployed guy from Arizona who stumbles on a terrorist plot to unleash a biological weapon.

[B]

Weapon.

[A]

Zack Ward, the actor, is the bully from Christmas Story with the Davy Crockett hat, the red hair. The movie opens with the 911 hijackers flying towards New York and arguing over how many virgins will be waiting for them in heaven. After realizing they aren't actually sure if any virgins will be waiting for them, they decide to divert the plane to the Bahamas. Just then, the passengers break into the cockpit, grabbing the hijackers and forcing the plane to crash into the two towers.

[D]

What does this have to do do with anything?

[A]

Some say that this is Bull's masterpiece when it comes to video game movies. Most of the movie's action takes place at a German themed amusement park called Little Germany that Bull himself plays a character in and says that the park was funded by Nazi gold.

[B]

Oh yeah, I have a clip of that.

[A]

Hell yeah, here we go. We got a clip folks. But I want to use that situation. Here we are live in TV and I want to explain a little about the, the financing of my movies and also from Little Germany, where the money comes from. Because you know, there are all the rumors out that my movies are financed with Nazi gold.

[B]

And what should I say?

[A]

It's true, but somebody must do something with the money.

[B]

I get a little horny here on stage sometimes.

[A]

If you see the crowd and all their children.

[D]

This is incredible.

[C]

Honestly, that was actually quite funny.

[A]

You know, this movie is kind of of the, I would say probably the best like movie in terms of like having a plot and having some, some laughs.

[D]

Yeah, he's at his best when he's not taking himself seriously, I guess.

[B]

Yes, absolutely.

[A]

But anyways, this scene devolves into madness and lots of children are depicted being killed, leading to many theaters flat out refusing to show the picture. Bol claimed he was just trying to challenge American moviegoers who are easily able to stomach hundreds of quote, adult characters being slaughtered on scre screen. The movie is definitely pilled as spoiler. There's a bit at the end about Osama bin Laden and George Bush being best friends and potentially lovers. Dave Foley plays the Postal Dude's pilled uncle. There was potential here, I feel like. And some of the Reddit guys claim that this is Bull's most faithful adaptation. Unfortunately, it only made about $150,000 with a 15 million dollar budget, which led one reviewer to revolution.

[D]

Christy Lemire for the Associated Press says, how does Uwe Bol keep getting work? Seriously, this is not a rhetorical question. Someone somewhere surely must know the answer.

[A]

So doesn't even address the movie.

[B]

She hadn't heard of the tax credit scheme. That's why. And Annie, you were telling us that you saw a ball movie that you remember.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. In the name of The King.

[C]

That's right.

[A]

Oh, yes.

[C]

I think in the Name of the King, A dungeon siege tale, I think it's called.

[A]

And he made like, four of those or something. Something crazy.

[C]

It's a. It's a kind of funny movie. I mean, it stars Jason Statham and I think it's got Ray Liotta as well. So it's like another one of those ones where it's like a weirdly, like, it's not just nobodies who are appearing and this.

[B]

It also had Burt Reynolds and Ron Perlman and Matthew Lillard.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Jonathan Rhys Davies. Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. It's. I mean, there was a couple things that I remember, like, sticking out to me. The one was. Which we've covered before. Yeah. Again, like, intensely gratuitous sex scenes that I. I was watching it with a group of guys at the time, and I remember actually feeling secondhand embarrassment for their gender, basically, because it was like, so gratuitous and so kind of. I don't know what the word is, other than like, just, like, straightforwardly, like, condescending to just, like, men as a whole, to straight men as a whole. Just like. This is what you like, isn't it? Like, you wouldn't be able to sit and watch this if we didn't show you this woman's boobs. I don't know. I sort of, like. Yeah, I. I kind of. I felt bad for them.

[A]

It's like only the biggest, fakest boobs for you fellas. We know what you really want. Something almost unnatural.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

But there was also another part of it which I guess was. So the character is engaged in battle. It's a kind of fantasy setting. And I think he's engaged in battle against a kind of species which are clearly meant to be based on orcs. I think they're called, like, Krugs or something like that. And, you know, that's like, fairly comm for fantasy at the time. But I guess as the film goes on, it kind of becomes clear that the Krugs kind of have a basic society, that they kind of have language. I don't know. It's kind of one of those weird things where you're just a bit like. You're kind of watching the main characters engage in a genocide of what seems to be a fairly sophisticated species.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

Which I guess, yeah. Given the political leanings of the movie we're about to discuss.

[A]

Right. I was going to say, not all that dissimilar from this film.

[B]

This one had a budget of $60 million. Jake.

[A]

Oh, wow. So double the last period piece. That's tough.

[B]

Yeah. And also currently 4% on rotten tomatoes.

[C]

Yeah, I would say that is generous. That is a generous 4%.

[B]

So this generational speedrun was about to come to an end for Dr. Boll. Germany tightened the Film Fund rules back in 2005, partly because of Uwe and his money machine died. Investors in his films had lost heavily, and later on, a Nuremberg court even ordered Ball to personally refund an investor.

[A]

Oh, my gosh.

[C]

I love the fact it's Nuremberg because it, like, really heavily implies that these films are war crimes.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

From then on, Bull says he financed his films with his own money, but they did not get better. In 2006, stewing over terrible reviews for his film, Ball challenged his harshest critics to real boxing matches, open to anyone who had written at least two extremely negative reviews. The online casino GoldenPalace.com sponsored the event and dubbed it RA Aging BO. Five critics accepted, including the late Richard Lotax. Kianca of Something Awful was not expecting

[D]

that name that said no. It felt like an entirely unique sentence. Like, if that hadn't happened, no one would have said that sentence in all of history.

[B]

And writers from Ain't It Cool News, Rue Morgue and more. They were told it was just a PR stunt. They'd get training, which they didn't. And Ball wouldn't actually hit them hard anyways. They were never told that Ball was a trained amateur boxer with over a decade of experience. He fought all five, beat all five, and dropped low tax inside two minutes. So here's a clip from a short doc about the event, starting with Ball and then introducing his opponents.

[A]

If you come up here and you fight me, then I will kick the shit out of you. All the Hacklers, all the critics, all the geeks are wannabe filmmakers. And as soon as they do something on their own, it sucked.

[B]

He's one of the most prolific filmmakers out there. Yes, he's shit, but he's prolific. His movies are bad.

[D]

They're terrible.

[A]

They're awful. They're hypnotically bad.

[D]

You done any boxing before?

[B]

Never.

[C]

Never before.

[A]

Never been in the ring.

[D]

I did not come to kick ass.

[B]

I came here for the free trip to Vancouver. What do you think about Dr. Bullet work? Most of his movies suck. So, yeah. And then this next clip is Bull in action, just destroying everybody, one after the other.

[A]

Incredible. I can't wait to watch this. The Deutschland Destroyer.

[B]

The Teutonic Terror. Dr. Umar. So, yeah, one of you described that

[A]

what we just saw, what we saw was a Human being getting to live out all of our fantasies. We've all had this fantasy of getting into the ring with our critics or, you know, somebody that said something mean or treated us poorly and just. They didn't know. They didn't know that you came to fucking fight and you beat the shit out of them. They were scared. They were puking afterwards. That's what happened. We saw somebody just like, achieve probably one of the most satisfying moments that a human being can have. If you've got a chip on your shoulder, if you're like a peaceful non Chip on your shoulder kind of person, that good for you. But, you know, for somebody like me, I got a couple people that I'd love. I would love to imagine doing this.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of. I guess these guys just clearly think that it's all a bit of a joke. One's got like a T shirt that says hi mom on it. And Uwe Bol is just like, really, just really trying to kill them in that ring.

[A]

He really is.

[B]

Around this time, a Stop Uwe Ball petition was circulating online. It peaked with about 354,000 signatures. A rival Long live Uwe Ball petition only got seven. Ball said he'd retire if the petition hit a million, but then reneged by recording a video declaring himself the only

[A]

genius in the whole fucking business. He went on, look, I'm not a fucking R slur like Michael Bay or the other people running around in that business or Eli Roth making some shitty movies over and over again. If you really look at my movies, you'll see my real genius.

[B]

Michael Bay responded saying, that bull was a fucking idiot.

[D]

Some dumb chum trying to get some fame when he has none. He's obviously a sad being when you ask, do I care? Not in the slightest.

[B]

So good. It was a rocky road from then on as he grinded for years trying to get more films made. When crowdfunding for his film Rampage 3 failed, he raged.

[A]

So goodbye and goodbye, Hollywood. Make another. Whatever. Marvel's Avengers Bullshit Dirt. I have enough money to play golf till I'm dead.

[C]

I so funny because, yeah, Marvel's and Avengers are really crappy movies, but compared to the stuff he's coming out with, at least from the two that I've seen, yeah, Dungeon Siege and In the Name of the King and Citizen Vigilante, his movies are probably the only ones that could make those movies look good, is basically what I'm saying.

[A]

Yeah, Yeah, I think that's a good point.

[B]

But yeah, to his line that he has enough money to play golf till he's dead. He did have a lot of dough, and his net worth I think now is estimated at around 10 million to 15 or so. And it makes sense because, you know, he had films with big stars like Ben Kingsley, Jason statham, Christian Slater, J.K. simmons, blah, blah, blah. Like, you know, those films are going to get residuals over the years.

[A]

Sure, yeah. He just got six bucks from me to rent Citizen Vigilante.

[B]

Oh, you paid for it?

[A]

Yeah, I watched it on the oled, the big screen.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

I thought it was going to be a lot better than it was.

[B]

Eventually, he mercifully announced his retirement, but he had a backup plan. Plan fine dining. In 2015, Bol opened Bauhaus, a high end modern German restaurant in Vancouver's historic Gastown.

[D]

Oh, really?

[B]

That's so funny.

[D]

Can I go to this? That's like maybe a 20 minute walkway from my house.

[A]

Is it still there?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Before it even opened, in typical bowl style, he'd insulted the city's rival restaurants in vicious YouTube reviews. And he soon grew to hate the neighborhood, writing to Vancouver politicians that he

[A]

and his wife got robbed, vandalized, peed on, yelled at, and spit on from homeless and drug addicts for five years. Vancouver is an expensive shithole that needs to get cleaned up. The homeless need to leave, period.

[B]

So it should be noted that this restaurant was just like a block or two away from the intersection of East Hastings in Maine, which is one of the poorest and most destitute like points in all of Canada, and derogatory line called wasting and pain. And it's like I've been around there. It is so sad. Like it's just, it is such a sad like Liv, I'm sure you, you have a lot of experience just like in that area. Can you describe a little bit?

[D]

Yeah, it's a very high concentration of homeless people who basically kind of banded together because it's like if we all kind of stay in this one area, it's harder for police to harass us. And you know, anything that's kind of around there is going to have, you know, any, any proximity to it. There are going to be some like homeless people who are like, particularly not doing well. Like I think possibly gotten at least worse from when it was in 2015 because of like Covid and the rise of housing prices. Still fundamentally, I believe like the 90s and the early aughts, it was a concentrated like much worse. Yeah, it still remains like a pretty terrible and produces a lot of like chuds like, basically, like, the orthodox liberal position on the situation is like, we gotta get them out of here. Like, you ask, like, a Vancouver liberal what they think about East Hasigstreet and they turn into Adolf Hitler.

[B]

Wow. Okay.

[C]

Okay. Just like, kind of saying that the homeless need to. Basically calling for, like. Yeah. Cleansing of the homeless.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

It's actually not betraying any particularly reactionary leanings. That's just the mainstream liberal, basically.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And not to go too far into this, but, like, you know, a lot of cities, you see the pot. You see poverty in pockets. Like in several places in a city. Right. Like downtown, outskirts, et cetera. But in Vancouver, it seems like it's all concentrated at one intersection. So a whole city's poverty in this one intersection and then contrasted with the rest of Vancouver, which is like this sort of, like, sparkling fake utopia. It's really stark. Like, if you. If you just, like, happen to walk to this intersection from, like, you know, the historic, pretty gas town, you're just like, wow, okay. This is how you do it in Vancouver.

[C]

Have those, like, horrible decline porn youtubers discovered it. Tyler Olivier have been there.

[D]

They love it.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I bet they do.

[D]

Yeah. Like, Americans know about these tastings. Like, who watch those. Oh, yeah. It's a very. Yeah.

[B]

The failed state of Canada.

[D]

Mm.

[B]

But Covid fortunately brought the closure of his restaurant in March 2020, and Bull moved his family back to Germany. So I don't know, Liv, if you had eaten in the Gastown area about, like, five or six years ago, I'm sure I had.

[D]

I can't remember this name specifically. It would be so funny if I

[B]

were to, like, have gone to Bauhaus.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

So as we inch closer to talking about the film at hand, we should talk politics. For most of his career, Bol presented as a leftist. He made movies about the Darfur genocide, mass shootings, revenge on Wall street bankers. He also very unfortunately made a Holocaust drama called Auschwitz, where he appeared in it himself as an SS guard. The German magazine Stern wrote the words

[C]

Auschwitz and Uwe Bohl in one breath. Rightly leads one to fear the worst.

[B]

I couldn't bring myself to watch this one hearing that had about 15 full minutes of torture porn in it.

[C]

Oh, my God.

[B]

Bol said this of the Auschwitz haters.

[A]

Half of my crew for 22 movies have been Jewish. My best friend, where I live in Vancouver, Jonathan Shaw is Jewish. It's completely absurd. They put me in a corner saying it's an insult to the Jewish community. It's totally bullshit. It's the opposite.

[B]

On his politics, some years back, Bull

[A]

said, I battled for the right causes. It's not like I made fascist movies. I'm very left wing and I hope that Bernie Sanders gets elected.

[B]

And 10 years after the Bernie endorsement, he is now the toast of the online right. In his own words.

[A]

Traditionally, I'm not a right wing person at all, but when something goes completely wrong, I point it out.

[B]

You're doing like a Mel Brooks impression for him. Larry David or something.

[A]

I don't know. I don't want to do like a German accent.

[B]

Sure, yeah, I hear you. Julian would have been the only one to do that.

[A]

Exactly, exactly.

[B]

Weaponized Autism Bol wrote, produced and directed Citizen Vigilante, which stars none other than Armie Hammer. Confusingly, Bol frames it as a companion piece to his film Run from last year, which is a somewhat empathetic story about the plight of refugees arriving on the Italian islands. He said his real world inspiration for Vigilante were gang rape cases from 2016 and 2020 in Hamburg, Germany. The facts in the 2016 case case are that four youths raped an intoxicated 14 year old girl and left her partially clothed and unconscious in freezing temperatures. She almost died. Four of the five got suspended sentences. In the 2020 case, an intoxicated 15 year old was raped over roughly two and a half hours during a festival. Nine were convicted, but only two went to prison. In regards to them inspiring the film,

[A]

he said, if you look at what happened in Hamburg where the rapists walked free without any penalty, it's as if we're living in a completely insane and absurd political environment, especially in Europe where people have completely lost, lost track. There's a huge difference between so called hate speech and stabbing people in the neck. But facts don't matter anymore. I studied crime statistics and at one point I felt I needed to make a film showing that if we don't get a grip on this, everything will go to shit.

[B]

But one of the many issues with his framing is that he blames migrants for a leniency that comes from German juvenile law, which prioritizes rehabilitation for offenders up to age 21, regardless of their background. Half of the 2020 perpetrators were German nationals, 19, not migrants. And they got the same suspended sentences as everyone else.

[C]

Yeah, and I think. I'm not kind of defending the like decisions that were made in these specific cases, which I don't really know anything about, but there is a tendency, I think, often to frame these kind of lenient sentences for juvenile offenders as a case of kind of woke sort of policies and soft hearted kind of policies. And it's actually just going from decades and decades of criminological research basically, which shows, I think that for, and particularly this is the case for sexual crimes committed by minors, that the recidivism rate, that is the rate that means that somebody will be likely to repeat their crime goes way, way up if they have a sentence in prison, basically, if

[B]

they spend time in prison.

[C]

So there obviously is a kind of problem in criminal courts in general with sexual crimes not being taken seriously. But I think a lot of the time, particularly what's happening with juvenile offenders is that the research has just kind of only ever really pointed one way for decades in this sense, which is often what leads to these kind of quite confusing and, and quite like, yeah, shocking sentences basically when they kind of hit the headlines.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So you may have caught my brief mention of Armie Hammer, the once almost a lister whose career completely imploded in 2021 due to allegations of assault and bizarre text messages about cannibalism and rape fantasies. Hammer's career destruction was so complete that in 2022 he started selling timeshares in the Cayman Islands. In an interview on the YouTube channel Kinocorner, he likened this experience to acting.

[A]

So you were in the Cayman Islands and you were selling time shares for a time. Did that feel like acting to you? Did that kind of.

[C]

Was that.

[D]

Did that feel?

[E]

Yeah, there were aspects of it that definitely felt analogous. You have to read what's going on with your scene partner in acting and react and respond to that the same way. With timeshare, you know, obviously the end result of a good scene is a bit more ethereal. The end result of a good timeshare is closing a deal. But you also, when you're selling timeshare, the fun part about it was it's like you have to read what the other person needs and then become that thing and give it to them. Like, does a guy need his ego stroked to get a timeshare or does he need his ego challenged? And you say something like, listen, I know these are really expensive and it's probably a little bit out of your price range, but I just want to show you this one other thing. And then they'll be like, well, no, I could afford. You know, and then that's. All of a sudden you got that guy. Or, you know, I don't know. It was fun. I really. I actually just recently saw my old timeshare boss. He flew through LA on a layover And I got to see him for a little bit, and it was great. Like, I. I really enjoyed selling timeshare.

[D]

I just. I love that he. The interviewer can like, barely deliver that question with a straight face.

[C]

This is so. So just a case of a guy who's had exactly two jobs in his life.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

Like, it's like. It's like the guy who's only a seen boss baby be like, getting a lot of boss baby vibes from this. Do you know?

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

And he's like, oh, yeah, it's great. I know exactly how to manipulate people.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. People always say their job is about reading people. I used to find that.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

Did you guys ever watch the Traitors?

[A]

Every season.

[C]

Oh, yes. It's so good. It cracks me up how, like, I don't think I've ever seen a single person on that show. They always just like, I'm a police officer, so my job is reading people. I'm a psychic, so my job is reading people. I'm an accountant, so my job is reading people. Yeah. This just reminds me of that.

[A]

They're like, as one of the winners of Survivor in 2011, I'm pretty good at reading people. And then they're all wrong. It's so traitors. If you want to watch, like, if you want to watch, like, 20 people, like, all, like, think they're right and be wrong, like, on tv. It's a great show. And Alan Cumming, of course, in 2024,

[B]

with no agent, manager, or publicist, Ball emailed Army directly and went through his attorney. It was Hammer's first acting offer in five years.

[A]

So, army, how did you get involved in this project?

[E]

Uma sent an email. He just sent an email and said, you know, are you busy? And I was like, nope. He's like, you want to do a movie? And he sent the script, and I read it, and I thought, this is amazing. I would love to do it. So it was really just kind of that simple.

[A]

He thought it was amazing.

[B]

Amazing.

[A]

The movie opens with a woman getting stabbed in the neck by, like, the most racist depiction of a brown person. Like, every brown person looks like a terrorist in the movie. It is like, oh, my God.

[B]

This script was amazing, though. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Hammer said, I'm pretty sure I cried.

[D]

It was just this moment where I was like, I'm gonna get to do the thing that I love more than anything other than my children. I would have done a fucking cat food commercial. I just want it to work again.

[B]

I do. Like, it's like, okay, Uwe Ball movie or cat food commercial kind of equivalent,

[C]

you know, I mean, it's kind of crazy that Amiyama was in, like, some really highly regarded movies.

[B]

Oh, yeah, Call me by your name. So many.

[C]

Yeah, the Social Network. I mean, like, I genuinely do think there is actually more dignity to just doing your timeshares.

[B]

Yes, yes.

[C]

Agree.

[B]

Ball was equally candid about why he wanted army for the role.

[A]

I cast him because he's a great actor and also because he was canceled and wanted to work. He wasn't charged with anything. There was no lawsuit. He was just a guy who was famous and fucking around. He's a handsome, charismatic guy who could be James Bond. In fact, he'd be perfect for the part.

[B]

Hammer said this about the role and his character, Sanders.

[D]

All of us have had vigilante fantasies. Every single one of us has been wronged. Every single one of us feels like there's not been justice. And all of us, whether in a small way or a big way, have had fantasies of taking matters into our own hands. Probably not a good idea to do that in real life, but getting to do it for a couple weeks, running around Croatia and killing people in the name of personal trouble, justice was a lot of fun.

[B]

It was just a lot of fun.

[D]

It's a lot of fun.

[C]

I want to pitch in here and kind of point out that several women have accused Armie Hammer of sexual misconduct. And I believe there was one allegation of straight up rape. I think it was like the LA county police kind of like, you know, began an investigation into this and then eventually put out a statement saying that they would not file charges. They did not clear him of any wrongdoing. They just actually put out a statement which, like, could not be more kind of clear and sort of, you know, in the sense that, like, look, we just don't have enough evidence to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt. We are not calling the women liars. You know, it was really, really kind of. Yeah, sort of, like, nuanced and kind of, you know, saying, we know that it takes, like, a lot to accuse somebody of rape and all of this sort of stuff. But all of this is to say, I don't know. If I were him, I would be extremely, extremely cautious. Talking about, every single one of us feels there hasn't been justice when we've been wronged. Every single one of us has vigilante. I would be extremely cautious about endorsing that idea at all, basically.

[B]

Sure. And about people saying, like, well, I've had fantasies about taking matters into our own hands. Probably not a good idea to do in real life.

[C]

We've all seen your fantasies. Yeah.

[A]

He's like, I'd love to kill the two women who ruined my career.

[B]

Yeah. So in that same interview on Kino Corner, he was asked about his inspiration for how he played the role, and he gave a very surprising answer.

[E]

There was a few things that I really wanted to get in there, and one of the main things was sort of like just creating a character. Character that lives in a very black and white world, almost to, like, being on the spectrum kind of sense where

[A]

it's like, a lot of people are

[B]

saying that your character is kind of autistic.

[E]

I was going for that. Like, that's definitely something I was trying to get in there. And I'm really happy people are picking it up because we didn't say anything about it. We didn't acknowledge it, but that was, like, in my head as I was reading it, I was like, this guy's a autistic. Like. Like, first, the way he just sees the world of, like. I wanted to get that in there. So I'm glad it came across like, autistic guy.

[D]

Special interest is Nazism.

[A]

It's funny. I didn't get that. I really didn't get that from him.

[B]

It seems so insulting.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

To me. To me, the movie was, like, about, like, you know, these, like, awful stories that you hear on the news about, like, some piece of shit who, like, goes into, like, a mosque or synagogue or whatever and, like, you know, shoots up a bunch of people or go into, like, Walmart, like, goes on a spree, like a school shooter. That's what I thought, like, his character was. I was like, oh, it's like a school shooter movie. But, like, the school shooter is the hero.

[B]

Yeah. So Hammer's fee was approximately $250,000, which is a steal, depending on how you look at it.

[A]

That's an insanely good rate. That's an insanely good rate for him, for the level of this movie.

[B]

Sure. When Variety broke the casting news in January 2025, the film was actually titled the Dark Knight with a K. Jeez. Oh, my God. Warner Brothers, who own the rights to the Batman films, sent a cease and desist, and Bull eventually gave in renaming it Citizen Vigilante.

[E]

Wow.

[D]

It really is just. What if Batman was racist?

[B]

Exactly.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

And no costume.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

What if Batman. He never had a costume?

[B]

Well, his costume in the film is sort of like how every right Winger on Twitter dresses.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

Black turtleneck.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Black Trench.

[B]

The film was self financed at roughly $2 million and shot run and Gun in Zagreb, Croatia, doubling for a deliberately generic quote, unquote Europe title card, while the on screen signage stayed Croatian. And this is ironic for a film about the dangers of mass migration, because Croatia is like the whitest country on Earth. It's 99% Caucasian. They don't like, let any immigrants. It's so funny.

[D]

Wow.

[B]

The whole thing took about 15 shooting days over three weeks with no permits. That's about like half on the very lowest end of shoot days, even for an indie production. Croatia denied the production its usual tax rebate, according to Ball, over political objections to the content.

[A]

Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. It felt to me like there were some scenes that were like, improvised like that. They were kind of writing the dialogue as they went like this. This makes a lot of sense to me. I'll bet it was fun. I'll bet they had a good time. But it does have that kind of like student film. We don't have any permits. Fucking get in, get out. Like, have fun with it. You can. Guys, like improvise.

[B]

The Dark Knight. The film is a completely and confoundingly non linear 89 minutes set in an unnamed European city that's coded for Germany. Throughout, the main character, Sanders monologues to camera delivered via a camcorder. Also throughout the entire film are shots of him loading various weapons and working out. The film does not look great. About a quarter of the shots are from consumer drones. It has a very crunchy color grade. Like very like black blacks. And like things are kind of blown out. Many shots are reused throughout. It feels like another quarter of the shots we've seen before. And the audio quality is just terrible. Like, I found it kind of hard to understand what people were saying over the din of like, music or sound design.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Any cinematic quality thoughts from the group before we go on?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I thought that it was just like there was so many edits. At one point I was like, how many times are we going to. To this guy? Like opening a drawer. It was something mundane like that. I was like, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8 shot 8 shots. He used to do that. Like he just would keep cutting back to like them. Like opening the chain on the bottom. Like, it was always. Everything took forever.

[B]

The film opens with an epigraph attributed to Anonymous.

[C]

All behavior traces to instinct. And when justice is denied, instinct turns to vengeance.

[B]

And then we hear like a gun being like, you know, or bullet being chambered in a gun. Then A very blonde mother and her young son are shopping at a small grocery store, sweetly negotiating over when the boy can eat some chocolate. As soon as they step outside, the music turns.

[A]

This also took 100 angles to shoot, by the way. There's like 50 cuts like of them like talking about the child. It's supposed to be like raising tension or whatever, but it just looks like like very amateur Y.

[B]

Mom, Mom, Mom.

[C]

What?

[B]

So will you guys sort of visually describe that?

[D]

Just the worst blood effects possible. She seems to be stabbed by an anonymous figure who's in maybe like a kind of run down coat who's holding a knife behind his back, just like stabs her right in the neck. It's yeah, the worst blood effects I've ever seen in my life.

[B]

Yes, it's definitely CG blood spray there. And of course it's a person of color who is red. Randomly stabbing her in the neck.

[A]

The knife might as well have like Islam written on it.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

We cut to a news broadcast reporting a country gripped by fear.

[C]

The nation is gripped by fear as a wave of shock sweeps the country. Her mother was murdered in broad daylight in front of her child by another suspected undocumented migrant. Parents were afraid and at their children play outside. And many women avoid venturing out after dark altogether. We took to the streets to hear what people think about the shadowy figure. Here's what they had to say.

[A]

He's a real hero. You know, we work, we pay taxes, and for what? To help all of Africa. You see, they come here and we pay for them and in return we get robbed.

[B]

And as a woman, you cannot go out after 9pm anymore.

[A]

No, it's to risk him.

[B]

I love that guy. He goes out there, he goes against all those criminals. They laugh about the police, but not about him.

[D]

I want to marry him. I mean, he's a real knight and

[B]

he helps to help us. So yeah, in the second half of that clip, it's a bunch of sort of on the street interviews and social media reactions that track his rising support.

[C]

I was describing it to my husband when I was, while I was watching it and I think, yeah, the way I tried to like frame it to him is I was just like, like it's like what the news reports on those purge movies are like.

[B]

Yes, exactly.

[C]

I don't know. Yeah, just like this like pure, kind of like vengeful, like right wing propaganda channel.

[A]

Yeah. It's crazy because also in that news clip that it's showing at the bottom, there's a moniker that's like four dead in case involving 14 year old rape or whatever. And those are the guys that he kills at the end of the movie. Like the timelines in this movie make no fucking sense. I think Uwe is trying to do like some kind of Nolan esque sort of like convergen of timelines, but it's

[B]

does not have the skill.

[A]

Yeah, it's indecipherable.

[B]

Yeah. And then Sanders is even seen watching the social media videos that are gushing about him in this next clip.

[A]

That guy out there, wow.

[C]

Have you heard of this vigilante crime

[A]

fighter guy over in Europe? He's like the real deal.

[E]

This man is taking out the trash.

[A]

I think we need somebody over here in this states like that. What do you guys think? Comment down below, let me know.

[E]

Look, this guy is

[A]

greatness.

[B]

Okay? We need more guys like this in Canada. Okay?

[D]

We need him.

[A]

I love him.

[B]

I love this guy. We need someone like him in Germany.

[A]

That guy is great. We need guy like this in and like he doesn't even know how to do the lie. Like he can't even make the social media stuff like look.

[D]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

It's so unconvincing. Right. It feels like social media done by like someone who's like never been on it before.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

There's like no life to it. It's like a post where a guy's talking lie. Oh no.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

It also feels like I think of like, I guess he's just taken from the Dark Knight but like. Like he doesn't understand how, how like big a country is where it's like, oh, he's stopping all of the migrant crime. This one guy is walking around shooting people. Stopping all of the migrant crime.

[C]

All of the migrant crime in Europe as well. In Europe, because they haven't even bothered to specify what country it is. So it's just on an entire continent.

[A]

And can we talk briefly about the fact that this guy is leaving his fingerprints everywhere. You watch the movie, he is like closing like he like murders this family at the end of the movie. We'll get to it. And then I watched him like read. He's like, oh, I forgot to leave my fingerprints at the crime scene. And he reaches back with his bare hand and closes the door behind him. This guy, he's touching car door handles. He's led five senators out into the same field. There is no way that he's not getting caught instantly. They don't even try.

[B]

We then meet our protagonist for the first time via a camcorder.

[E]

There's been a lot said about me. So I thought you should hear directly from me. Everything that I do, I do for you. I can't sit here and watch you exist in a state of sleep paralysis anymore. The truth is this. You are all being used. You are all nothing but playthings. Every soldier who's gone off to war thinking that their death was for an idea or that their sacrifice was important for society has been played. Clinton, Biden, Trump. You never see them on the front lines of any battle. Why? Because they would never risk their own lives. They have you.

[D]

It is like, weirdly like it's centrist fascism. I feel like you can see this with how RBM talks about it, where it's like, oh, you know, look, we don't endorse everything about this, but it feels. And as a political moderate, I imagine

[C]

it would have been easy if I had read the script to see where this was going. But I kind of do wonder if. Because I guess a lot of the proper Radio Rwanda style stuff comes in the form of the news bulletins that kind of keep on cutting in. And they'll say stuff like, migrants are making women afraid to walk on the streets, or migrants are officially now taking more from GDP than they are putting in. And things like that. Stuff like that. Which is just like, oh, this is just like pure, pure racist propaganda in a way that kind of makes me wonder if, like, Armie Hammer, when he's doing his script, and maybe I'm giving him too much credit here, kind of thinks this is more of a cool, edgy Batman thing and isn't necessarily spotting the kind of.

[B]

Yeah, it's possible because, yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about some alternate reads of the movie later where it's seen more as satire. But, yeah, that's good. Sort of ripe for discussion now that

[A]

I know that he's playing an autistic guy. The movie's a lot better. I think it works a lot. It works a lot better for me now that I sort of know what he's going for, now that I kind of see. I see what he's doing now.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

It's also just so funny. He's talking. The only politicians he references are Biden and Trump. When he's, like, specifically meant to be, like, in Europe. Like, combating, like, the European problem could not be more obvious. I guess that this is just, like, geared towards America.

[B]

He also referenced Clinton. Yeah, like, guy.

[C]

Yeah, like, just like, even less relevant to, like, presumably his European audience.

[B]

The action proper begins with Sanders massacring a crime Syndicate of three people, gunfire in a blacked out room. Intercut with his voiceover. And we can't see anything that's happening. Interpol regional chief Henry, played by the Saw franchise veteran Costas Mandalore, gives a televised statement floating that the vigilante may be an anti democratic terror cell supported by Russia and Chinese government institutions. Meanwhile, Sanders rides the bus. This is Uwe's favorite scene in the film. In it, a few teenage hooligans get on the bus and refuse to pay. So here's the first clip of that. Hey, hey, hey, hey, guys.

[A]

Your tickets to you.

[B]

Guys, guys, you did not pay your tickets. It's 150 per person. Fuck up and drive. It's 150 per person. Didn't I tell you to sit down and drive the fucking bus? 150 per person.

[E]

Please, gentlemen, everyone on this bus has somewhere they have to be and for some of us it's urgent. So please resolve your issues and go drive the bus.

[D]

Could you imagine how unefficient buses would be if this is how things work?

[B]

So Sanders does pay for the kids and then sits next to them and starts to lecture them and puts a gun up to the the waist of one of the children.

[E]

Who we are and what we do has ramifications in our lives and in the lives of everyone around us. You don't understand. All right, pay attention. Let me explain this to you. If you get onto a bus and you don't pay your ticket, if you go to the movie theater, if you grab a banana at a grocery store and you don't pay, eventually the cost of everything will go up. If 10% doesn't pay, the cost will go up 10% to cover the loss. And that's not fair. You're going to look back at this moment and realize that it is the luckiest you have ever been. Believe me.

[D]

The kid is so chill about just this strange adult coming up to him and pointing a gun at him.

[C]

Yeah. This kid has ice running through his veins.

[D]

Like.

[A]

Yeah, he's like, society must function. You must pay the bus driver.

[B]

I think it's. Yeah, it's very telling that this is like the German director's favorite scene of the movie.

[C]

I guess it's worth saying that this group of wayward teens, they are multiracial as well.

[B]

Yeah, but they're supposed to be. So later in the film, we see them, they're speaking Arabic.

[C]

Oh, what?

[B]

Oh, I think he just couldn't get as many minorities as he wanted just because there aren't that Many in Croatia

[A]

for the chopping block.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

Instead, he's like, it's kind of multiracial, but they are somehow supposed to be, like, maybe Middle Eastern Muslim.

[C]

Right. Okay.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

If you see them from behind, they each have Islam sort of written on there, written stitched into the back of their jackets.

[B]

Yeah.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

So next up, Sanders visits Elsa, a rape victim who was badly beaten in her attack, and pitches her his alternative to the courts. Who are you?

[E]

I'm just. Just here to help. What do you want to happen?

[B]

What do you mean?

[E]

Men who did this to you, what do you want to happen to them?

[D]

I want them to go to jail for the rest of their lives.

[A]

Not good enough.

[B]

No, not the right answer, lady. Not the right answer. So he continues pitching his own brand of justice and asking if she wants him to enact it.

[E]

And, of course, you'll have to participate in that trial telling the story of what those men did to you over and over in a room full of people who are going to call you a liar and try to poke holes in every detail of your story. And then during that long and expensive trial, we have to hope and pray that the men who did this to you don't do the same exact thing to somebody else. Do you want justice?

[A]

Yes.

[D]

Which I guess, implication. She's like, I never thought of that before. I guess I do want you to be judge, jury, and executioner.

[A]

This is just further abuse. Like, breaking into this poor woman's, like, poor woman's fucking hospital room. She already is, like, you know, like, in the worst. In the worst state of her life. And he's like, what do you want to happen? She's like, yeah, I'd like them to go to jail for the rest of their life. And then he, like, pressures her for, like, threatens her, basically. Like, no, like, actually, like, that's not even going to work. Like, wouldn't you basically forces her to ask him to kill them for her. And this is. He. He goes and does this. He has this thing where he, like, asks permission almost, or it's like he basically is like, I have to get the kill order from the victim first. But he. He, like, goes and, like, forces it out of them. It's the most bizarre plot point. Only a man. Only a man could write this and think that this is, like. That this is, like, what a woman.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

He wants after she's been raped wants.

[B]

Exactly, yeah.

[D]

It's funny that he's written as, like, a persuasive, powerful political figure who's, like, has really strong Rhetorical skills. Like, it shows how. It's like when a dumb person writing a script writes a smart guy and they're very stupid.

[B]

Yes, exactly.

[D]

Bowl himself is not convincing politically. He can't. So he can't write the character he wants.

[A]

He does really capture somebody on the spectrum really well, though, I got to say. Like.

[B]

But he's also just like being very wooden in his performance.

[D]

Right.

[A]

I'm being totally facetious. I was going to go on to say, like, all of my, like, yeah, like all of my friends who are on the spectrum, like, are incredibly, like, aggressive and like, they love going up to people like strangers in public actually, and threatening them. Like, very. This is very like stereotypical of people, people with, you know, who live with that.

[D]

It's so interesting that he's doing this all in the name of democracy when it's like not following the rules. Like, you'd think if it's like autistic guy who's really rigid about the rules. You know, it's interesting. It's a very like American fascist sort of thing where they say that they're pro democracy even though they're not, because, like, the institution has lasted so long. It's interesting to see a German do that given, like, how newly implemented democracy, like a parliamentary system is in their society. They're getting like America brained to that point.

[B]

Through his monologues, we learn who Sanders really is. And he is an American with no residency in the country, in the country illegally, supposedly taking care of family assets that happen to be there, and reveals my favorite detail of the whole film, which is that he's a landlord.

[D]

Yes. That was incredible.

[E]

We are a very hands on landlord and management company. And whenever a tenant moves out, quite often we will go through the unit to inspect for damage to make sure that if we can, we can give them as much of their security deposit back as possible.

[B]

So weird and boring.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

By the way, like, the scene that they're showing of him, like, looking at the buildings is taking pictures. It isn't even for the tenants. It's for his own place. You find out looking later that he's like, by the way, he's like, my piece of shit apartment is like crumbling. Like, the place I'm saying is like, these are pictures. Like, he's not even. Oh, my God.

[B]

At a surprise inspection of his real estate company, he lectures them about evictions.

[A]

Hope you don't mind me using your office while you're gone. And I need some privacy for delicate calls with tenants who are behind on their rent.

[E]

How many behind on the rent?

[A]

We always under 10%. So on average, 90% of the the rent comes in each month.

[E]

Are there fluctuations or is it the same 10% each month? If so, I want them evicted.

[A]

Well, the procedure is after three months of unpaid rent, we send a final notice to pay within four weeks. And if that payment doesn't come through, we get a court order and that

[B]

will allow us to evict them within seven months total.

[E]

So if somebody doesn't want to pay, they get to live for free for seven months.

[B]

If you want to see it that

[A]

way, then you are right.

[E]

Is there another way to look at it? We have 3,500 units in this city, Owen. That brings us in €50,400,000 annually. 10% of that is €5,040,000 that people are stealing from me. It's unacceptable. Evict them immediately.

[B]

It's just such a bizarre, like fantasy.

[C]

It's so bizarre. I get the kind of romantic folk outlaw kind of thing that they're going for at the beginning. But then you're kind of thinking, well, I don't know, then you're thinking of people like Robin Hood, right? And like there isn't a scene where Robin Hood is like talking about evil, evicting all of the, like all the tenants who are back on their rent, like specifically he's like fighting those guys.

[B]

We're only making 50 million euros. We could be making 60.

[C]

Right. I think it like speaks to just like this kind of very specific, like right wing anxiety of being. You know, people are taking advantage of you, they're kind of taking advantage of you in their vulnerability. And I think that like really comes through here, that this is like not just a folk vigilante kind of like story, but this is like specifically geared to a very right wing neurosis.

[B]

Yeah, it's tailor made for that platonic

[D]

ideal of like fascist guy.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, that's it. Which kind of, I think like differentiates it from other kind of like vigilante like stories which, you know, will certainly flirt with that. That political tendency will certainly kind of like, you know, have a like little kind of romance, kind of dark night of the soul with it, but kind of won't come right up to it in that same way.

[D]

So looking back on this with the, the mention of ironic or satirical interpretations, I can see the landlord bit being a bit of an attempt at plausible deniability of like, look, he's not. Look, he's very weirdly autistic in a certain way. About justice and rules. But he's not all good, necessarily. It's like a very poorly written version of Rorschach kind of.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[C]

Yeah. I guess that is also a bit in that same scene where he's kind of lecturing his shiftless manager where the manager is just like, yeah. Saying, like, oh, but the government wants us to give all of these apartments to refugees if we evict people. And he's like, no, we're not gonna do that either. Yeah, yeah. It's a funny one.

[A]

I see why Elon Musk likes it because he's honoring that level of, like, evilness and greed that it's like, no, it's like 50 million. No, it's like, instead of being like, okay, well, 10% burn off like that, okay? And it's this much to take them to court and get them out. All right, whatever. But it's like, no, they're stealing 10 million from me. Every single, 5 million from me.

[E]

Every.

[A]

Every single month they didn't earn. They're living for free, and odds are they're black or they're brown. Like. Like, it's just. Oh, God. This is the. This is the problem. Like, what. What would happen actually if. If 10%, if it was built into our system. That 10% did actually go to people who are having troubles, and it did fluctuate. And there was a slush fund, you know, that people could rely on, you know, like, oh, my God, these people wouldn't even notice that it's gone.

[D]

I do won us to feel the way that a lot of people feel about Trump, where, like, they don't like him, but they think he's doing a good job presidentially, where it's like, we don't like. But, like, it's the rules. We need people who follow the rules in society.

[B]

Of his holdings, included is a brothel. Which brings us to the film's one erotic scene where Armie stops mid sex because he sees mold on the ceiling,

[A]

which makes a lot more sense now.

[B]

Yes, It's, like, played out like a

[A]

horror movie with, like, Twin Peak style, like, music.

[D]

What it is, it's mold.

[E]

When you let clients shower in the bathroom after you're done, do you open the window?

[B]

No.

[E]

Why? If you let them shower and it gets hot, the steam builds up and you get mold in the room.

[C]

But why you care?

[E]

Because I own the building.

[A]

You own the building?

[C]

Building.

[E]

Wow.

[B]

Really?

[E]

What, do you think your pimps own the building?

[C]

I don't know. So I shouldn't have took your money?

[E]

Of Course you did your job. You started anyway, now we finish.

[A]

Yikes.

[B]

There's a lot going on in that scene.

[D]

It gets funnier when you realize the scale of how many buildings he owns. Because I thought, initially I thought it was like, maybe he owns one or two. Two buildings. But then we see with the scene of like, you know, 10% of tenants not paying that, like, he owns so many buildings.

[A]

Like, this guy, this guy is like a fucking real estate type. This is like if, like Richard Branson was going around in a black turtleneck and trench coat and just like murdering people, like, and leaving his fingerprints everywhere.

[C]

It also makes it so much worse that at the beginning of the brothel scene where he introduces himself to the sex worker, he offers her €50.

[B]

Right?

[C]

I mean, what a fucking, like, cheapskate. Jesus Christ. You own all of this stuff and you like, you can't even, just. Yeah, you can't even pay her properly.

[B]

€50.

[C]

Yeah. And then she's like, oh, maybe I shouldn't have taken your money.

[B]

I mean, yeah, the €50 you can

[A]

get what, like a Wendy's combo?

[C]

Yeah, it's like a really, really pathetic amount of money. I also want to point out it's like really nothing to do with anything. But the sex scene is like the moment where I always have this when I'm watching a really bad movie and you kind of realize lies to yourself. You're like, oh, I bet making films is really hard. But there's like a scene he says, get on the bed. And then they, like, talk a bit more and then she gets on the bed. And then he says, get on the bed again, even though she very clearly is on the bed. There were like a few scenes like that where he, like, repeats himself in weird ways. But that one I was just a bit like, oh, yeah. I guess I'd never really thought about it before because I've never filmed anything before. But I guess it is actually a little bit complicated to like, know where everyone's going to be and how it's all going to be. Like, cut to.

[B]

Yeah, the role on set is like a script supervisor or continuity. And I really don't think this film had it.

[C]

No.

[A]

Yeah, they were running and gunning.

[B]

Yeah. So we have another, like a mid movie monologue at this point where he of course mentions Nietzsche. And then we see him at a nightclub where he watches two men plan to drug women, but switches their drinks so they dose themselves instead. So Henry, the Interpol chief, happens to be at this bar just for some reason and collects. Collects A glass that Sanders handled to pull his DNA. So this is one of the many surfaces he touches.

[E]

Yes.

[B]

Where he can get his. I guess it's weird. Like, get his DNA. I thought it would be more fingerprints. Anyways, it leads Interpol to an address, and then a fully militarized Interpol SWAT unit, which I'm sure does not exist, storms the property. Come out.

[C]

Surrender.

[E]

I understand that you're here to do your job. I have no interest in killing all of you. But if you try to stop me from doing my job, I will be forced to kill you all. This is your last warning to leave.

[B]

The dialog is so bad. It's just like, I know you're doing your job, but I'm doing my job. I don't want to kill you, but I will have to kill you if you do your job.

[A]

It's like video game dialogue.

[D]

He's in this big method metal box through, like, a long hallway where he has these two AK47s mounted in slits. And then these 10 soldiers come out and stand right in front of the box and just in the perfect vantage point. And they're like, you gotta come out now.

[A]

Idiots. They could have easily gassed him out of that thing. It was so. Yeah.

[D]

Or just not stand in front of a mounted ak. Like, I think this is probably the dumbest scene for me in the film.

[B]

Yeah. Apparently the whole house is just a facade built around this armored building box that Sanders is in. And he warns the tactical team over a speaker to leave, but Henry orders them to fire. And here is that scene, which is. It's only 20 minutes into the movie, but it is like. It's sort of one of the two centerpieces of the film.

[A]

Fire. Fire at the metal box that we can't get into. Just fire through the metal.

[B]

So this goes. This goes on for I feel like 10 minutes or something where it takes so long. You just see in slow motion, officer after officer getting all their limbs blown off.

[D]

It's like video game AI, like, splattered.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And then the Interpol chief, for some reason, just keeps sending more and more officers into the room. As soon as, like, 10 officers are dead, he sends another 10 in. And it just is this endless stream of carnage.

[A]

It's a wave mission, Brad. We're waiting for, like. We're basically waiting for the check, like, game save to pop up to let us know that we're, like, at the next checkpoint.

[B]

But this is supposed to be. This is supposed to be like a crack Interpol operative who is who is masterminding this, this mission here. So a booby trap bomb then puts Chief Henry in the hospital, sadly. Next scene, Sanders visits the father of a 14 year old sexual assault victim to confirm the family found no justice in court. It's sort of exactly like the previous scene, but with a different person. It's very confusing. This is the case that forms the spine of the film's climax, which is about to come. Which Ball says mirrors those two Hamburg cases we talked about. But first, the teen thugs from the bus reappear and this time they're harassing and beating a teenager in the park, all while speaking what I think is supposed to be Arabic. And at the end of the clip, Sanders comes to the rescue,

[A]

Tasing him. He's just grabbing the kids and tasing them.

[E]

Get your phone, call your parents, tell them you want to press charges on each one of these pieces of. I'll give you their name.

[A]

I think this is supposed to be a Jewish boy.

[D]

I thought it was like they were trying to speak French or something, like they really miss.

[B]

Yeah, I'm not sure, but. But anyways, it's very strange because Sanders just by chances walking through this park when these same kids from the bus in this like European metropolis are harassing this kid.

[D]

There's like 20 people who live in this country.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And nobody else is at this park, by the way. Just the kids he saw on the bus and the Jewish boy that they're tormenting.

[B]

So then the boy runs away and Sanders just brutally fucking beats them and threatens their lives. Here's the clip.

[E]

Hello, boys. You remember me? If I ever see you put your hands on anyone else ever again, I will visit you and you will not be walking away from it. You understand? You. You remember when I told you on the bus that it was your lucky day? Maybe now you understand.

[A]

He's crushing their wrists and fingers.

[B]

He stamps on their hands and their wrists until they're like broken off, basically. And these are teenagers.

[A]

This movie sucks. Yeah, like there's no reason for this movie. We already had taken. We already had taken. We already had Falling down with Michael Douglas. There's no point for this. This is literally a guy who is a violent guy and he somehow scraped together two million million dollars. And he's got like a very violent army hammer who's got a giant Hebrew tattoo of an aleph I believe, on his like tummy.

[B]

I do wonder if that's like, brother,

[A]

I bet that, I bet you that that is a real tattoo.

[B]

Okay, interesting. All right.

[A]

Why would the character have a Hebrew letter on his tummy.

[D]

Yes.

[A]

It's like a big. Almost like medieval scripted Aleph.

[B]

Yep. We're in the home stretch here, everyone. And we're getting to the darkest act of the entire film.

[A]

Never apologize for content. If Travis isn't here, it's, you know,

[B]

I have to say so. Sanders abducts a judge who freed the gang rapists, apparently. And after another tiresome monologue which includes this line, you let a gang of

[D]

rapists go, might as well have raped her yourself.

[B]

He then stages the judge's death, which

[D]

the staging is so like, the idea that any coroner would look at this and think it's a suicide is like, yes. Like, oh, there's a heroin injection into their neck. And they, like, without drinking, have poured some vodka on their body. This is clearly a guy who's really guilty.

[B]

And then slit their wrists. Yeah.

[A]

I was, like, half paying attention to the movie at this point. I had my phone kind of in my hand. I was scrolling a little bit, but I looked up because I. I, like, heard the splashes of like. I was like, why is he just, like, dumping vodka on this guy? I was like, is he going to light him on fire? I was like, this movie sucks. And then it's like, maybe one of the most gratuitous, like, wrist slitting scenes I think I've ever seen any movie for absolutely no fucking reason. Like, worse than Drive when Albert Brooks. Oh, spoilers, I guess if you haven't seen Drive yet, that's sort of on you. But, like, that's a bad wrist slitting scene. I've seen a couple in my day, and this was easily one of the worst. You see him open up both of this guy's wrists.

[B]

Yeah. It's.

[E]

Yeah.

[B]

Terrible. So Sanders then goes to the home of Yusuf, who's one of the freed rapists, where he and his whole family are headed having lunch.

[E]

Maybe we have just a little chat back. Oh, good. Yousef's here.

[A]

Relax.

[E]

Go. Hello, Yousef.

[C]

Yousef, run.

[B]

Where are they going?

[A]

What are you doing?

[E]

Go tend to your son. Tie something around his leg. I didn't hit an artery. He should be fine.

[D]

I didn't hit an artery. As if he's like. I think he is being written as, like, autistic superpower character.

[B]

Yeah. So, yeah, he sort of barges in the house past the dad to see. It's like a scene of just this sort of like, nice scene of a family having lunch, like a kind of like a normal afternoon affair, and then shoots the teen in the leg almost immediately. And then he holds them at gunpoint on the couch. In this next clip, Yusuf and his father plead their case.

[A]

Bol stole this from fucking Tate. Taken, by the way. It's the exact same scene where. Where Neeson, like, goes to his, like French, like police officer, but he's like, you forgot to tell the way you forgot the. The weight of a loaded Converse is the weight of an unloaded gun. Like he shoots the wife in the knee. It's the same exact scene, except he doesn't execute everybody at the end of it.

[E]

We're here because of my son, because of the court.

[B]

The court free him.

[E]

And this is the court from your country, of course, because your son and his friends had to rape that 14 year old girl. So traumatized from their childhood that they couldn't keep their dicks in their pants. It was very good work by your attorney, by the way, painting them as the victim. What was it? Traumatic integration.

[B]

We're really getting mental help now and support. We will be better in the future. I promise that.

[E]

It's the right answer.

[D]

Which also, like, yeah, that's what your attorney, like, that's how the court works.

[B]

Typically that is the law. Yes. If you're following the rules, that's, I guess, the law. He then accuses the seemingly innocent sister and points a gun at her.

[E]

The only problem is that on your social media since the event, I have not seen any regret or empathy. In fact, I think you said that she deserved to be raped.

[C]

What I mean is that they dress wrong and just make boys horny with their mini skirts. They show their legs and breasts.

[E]

You wrote that she deserved it, which.

[D]

It's so weird that she's. The sister. Is there outdoors at the rape.

[B]

Yes. Just watching.

[D]

This is really the point where it's like, is he gonna do the thing that Jake just previously mentioned that he does? Is he really?

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

Are we really doing that?

[A]

Cause the kid seems to pretty like. The kid seems pretty apologetic. He's like crying. He's like, look, I'm getting like mental. Like, obviously, you know, I'm not. Look, I'm not trying to say any. I'm not trying to say nothing, complainers. But like the kids, look, he's like, you know, he went through the court system, he got punished. Like, hopefully, maybe he can like be reformed. You know, yada, yada, yada. Like the statistic that Brad gave about people who go to prison, I think it was.

[B]

No, that was Annie.

[A]

Annie. You know, people who go to prison are like way more like, likely to, like, you know, become, like, repeat offenders. So I was like. I was like, you know, maybe. Like, maybe he won't do that thing.

[C]

And. Yeah, I kind of. I guess I want to point out that, like, if any of this was to do with protecting women or women's rights, then you would understand that the sister and the mother are presumably a victim of that culture as well.

[B]

Sure.

[C]

Like, if anything, they would be its first victims.

[B]

No, they're just guilty.

[C]

Yeah, but they're not. Because it's a racial animus, essentially.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

Which is using kind of women's rights as a. As a very vague cover. They are kind of all cast under the same kind of guilty ethnicity, essentially.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

He then lectures about the values of the west that could be lifted from every other post on X that I read. Like, as soon as I open up X.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

It's just this over and over.

[A]

This is why Elon loves this movie.

[D]

Yeah.

[E]

Are these the values you're teaching your children?

[B]

I teach him the values from Quran and these values from our family.

[E]

Well, 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? Do you know what I think?

[D]

Why?

[E]

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. To religion over democracy and over anything else, including the rule of law, which

[D]

it's so awesome to kind of go forward a little bit about what's about to happen. Like, Uwe Boll is about to discover honor killings from First Principle and say that they're good. Like, while lecturing about Western values, he's discovering that honor killings are cool.

[C]

And rule of Law, which he's like, literally in previous scenes, kind of said, is useless because it's really hard and the victims may have a tough time doing it. So it's not worth. Not worth doing.

[B]

He then forces Yousef to phone his accomplices one by one and summon them to the apartment. It's a bizarre sequence where he not only massacres the whole family, including the mom and sister, but a seemingly endless parade of accomplices that come over two by two by two by two. He then just shoots in the back over and over. What the fuck happened?

[C]

What's wrong?

[E]

Go in. It's okay. It's okay. What the hell?

[C]

Everything's okay.

[D]

It's insane.

[B]

And this is shot. It's so ridiculous. It's all, like, slow mo With a bunch of confusing reflections, repeated shots.

[A]

Nobody that he's shooting is a threat in any way. Every execution is cowardly and from behind.

[B]

Yeah, it's like in the back of their heads.

[A]

None of these people are a threat to him.

[C]

It is such a confusingly staged scene. Like, can anyone figure out why he doesn't just get them all together all at once? Like, why the accomplices do come in two by two like that? Because it surely would make more kind of. It should surely be more dramatic if he shoots them all then and there, I guess.

[B]

But this is, like, truly one of the ugliest and, like, most miserable scenes I've ever seen in a film. And I've seen, like, I've seen disturbing movies that have, like, brutal violence, that are about war, that are done really well, obviously, and like, give you different perspectives, et cetera. But this is just. It's just hate on screen, wanton violence and hate. And Ball said that he asked hundreds of actors to be the family before finally finding one group of people that was wild. So obviously, yeah, people read the script, they're like, fuck, no.

[D]

It's a Mia Khalifa situation of they had to find a Maronite Christian woman to do the hijab porn scene. Right.

[B]

So after the family annihilation, Sanders visits the hospitalized Chief Henry with a message for him and the government. Hello.

[E]

Hello, Chief Henry. Very happy you survived because I have a message for you to take to the government.

[A]

What is this message?

[E]

It's the same message I told you when you tried to storm my bunker that the people will not accept a takeover. This is an unfriendly takeover by the Islamist extremists. And the blindsided woke left. And if this takeover is successful, it'll destroy the democracy you say you love, all the freedom, everything you enjoy and stand for. There's only one option. You end this or we the people will end it ourselves.

[C]

Everything you enjoy and stand for is like, that's what I do in my, like, first draft. And then I like. And I'm just like, oh, what? What was I even trying to say there?

[D]

The implication here is that he's like, rhetorically skilled, that he's like, pilled the commissioner, I guess, like, he's got him to, like, come to Jesus moment.

[A]

But by the way, the commissioner already liked him. The movie opens up with the commissioner watching videos of guys being like, look, I think this guy, he's. Can I say dare that he's handsome even, you know, and like the commissioners in the car, like, cracking a smile Being like, I hate that I have to bring this guy. Even his monologues are like, look, man, like, these are the rules. And society doesn't function without the rules. I have to bring you in.

[D]

It really doesn't make sense how he's such a stickler for the rules about rent. Like why you would construct a character like that. He's like, no, but this rule, that's like making a bunch of terrible, you know, evicting a bunch of people, making them homeless. Like, no, the rules are the rules.

[A]

He's also like a horrible cop killer. Is that like supposed to be like his antifa half? They're like, he's half. And he's half antifa half, half.

[D]

He's remorse for it. He's like, you can leave.

[B]

Exactly.

[D]

Giving you permission.

[B]

He didn't want to kill the cops, but they got in the way. So the second last scene is another sympathetic news report about the vigilantes killings, including the killing of the entire family. And a bunch of negative stats about migrants.

[C]

What possesses the greater threat to society? The criminals committing these heinous acts or the vigilante who is eliminating them? According to Europe's criminal statistics, over 105,000 violent crimes were attributed to migrants last year, including 980 murders and over 18,000 reported cases of sexual assault involving immigrants from Africa.

[A]

Unfucking believable and only giving.

[B]

Only giving. Like the stat that's like, these are the amount of crimes committed by migrants, but that's the only statistic we're going to give you.

[D]

Yeah, there are like, as far as I'm aware, like zero African migrants in Croatia.

[B]

Exactly.

[D]

I know that there's another canceled actor. Kevin Spacey did a movie about the first Croatian president, Tuchman. Really?

[C]

Yeah.

[D]

Where he plays it straight. Frank Underwood, by the way. I don't know, there's something going on with Croatian film.

[B]

Amazing. So, yeah. And in that clip, the teenage victim of Yusuf and his cohorts learns that her attackers are dead and smiles to

[D]

the camera like, the attackers and the family. Which is like.

[B]

And the family.

[D]

Could you like

[A]

the idea that that

[D]

would have automatically been someone very happy that you've just like, honor killinged in their name?

[B]

Potentially dubious, Sanders signs off with one last scrambled broadcast, telling viewers it's time to act.

[E]

I'm here to help you take that control back. I'm here to show you that you are no longer the victims. I'm here to show show you that it's time to go out and show these fuckers that they aren't getting away with it anymore. Remember, I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself.

[D]

This film is dedicated to the Brain Mujahideen fighters.

[B]

Yeah. So the film's end dedication card reads,

[C]

to the thousands of rape and murder victims in Europe betrayed by the legal system.

[B]

Yeah. So that's the last words on screen.

[D]

Which again, abstractly, it's like, I mean, yes, that's your legal systems. Not in the way that he means it abstractly.

[A]

Yes. Yeah, fuck you all.

[B]

So let's talk about the reception. For a film that has no right to be getting any buzz at all, it's been expectedly polarizing upon release, Germany's film ratings board, the fsk, twice refused to give the film any rating at all, a decision that blocks theatrical retail TV and any mainstream streaming distribution in Germany. A third review granted an 18 in July. But this has hasn't stopped the right from declaring that it's, quote, unquote, banned in Germany.

[D]

It's not even fucking banned in Germany. That's so funny.

[B]

No, it's. Yeah, it's everywhere in Germany. After the film was pirated and streamed for free, Bol publicly asked the people who watched it illegally to send him 7 to €10 over PayPal on the grounds that he had financed it.

[D]

In my life he's found a way to make profitable films.

[B]

Yes. Now he has.

[C]

Yeah, I did see somebody, a screenshot of somebody, somebody saying like, yeah, you know, since Musk posted the whole Citizen Vigilante to X, I've watched it like 24 times. It's such an amazing film. Bol actually replies to them himself and it's just like, please consider donating.

[B]

Oh my God.

[C]

It seems like a mixed blessing, I guess, just having your movie like benevolently pirated like that.

[B]

Quiver Distribution released the film digitally on June 19, and the few critics who bothered to watch it demolished it. So it sits at about 6% on rotten tomatoes right now, which is actually pretty high. I think it's kind of high for a ball movie.

[A]

Yeah, true.

[B]

And that's about 18 critic reviews, the lowest critical score of any Armie Hammer movie in his career. Variety's Todd Gilchrist wrote, the film is

[A]

so astonishingly bad, it almost feels like the writer, director, producer is deliberately sabotaging his star, Armie Hammer, whose intended combat can only be harmed by this project.

[B]

The Bulwarks. Sonny Bunch, a self professed lover of vigilante movies, said, hopefully then you'll believe

[D]

me when I say that the problem with Citizen Vigil Vigilante is Not that it's rancid fascist dog shit. Worse than that, it's incompetently made dog shit.

[B]

Is that really the worst part of it?

[D]

Yeah, the Norm MacDonald's like the worst part was the rapes joke.

[B]

Yeah. Nathan Rabin, who once co wrote a book Defending Ball, called it the most

[C]

racist film since D.W. griffith's controversial 1915 melodrama the Birth of a Nation.

[D]

I honestly would come out of this thinking it was more racist than that film. Like that was one of my original thoughts. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, actually, yeah.

[B]

And Josh Lewis, one star Letterboxd review.

[A]

Heartwarming. Bald German idiot has 30 year moviemaking career despite never learning to compose or edit frame. Be more demanding of your evil. Filmmakers have standards.

[B]

The Voice of the People though, is another story. Against that 6% critic score with 18 reviews sits a 92% audience score from almost 3,000. And here are a couple highlights. Notice a pattern in these, by the

[D]

way, a bit rough on the cinematic side. Armie Hammer was perfect. Messaging was powerful and related to many ellipses, not just Europe.

[C]

Not a great movie, but an excellent guide to our future. I'd recommend this movie to everyone. Everyone.

[A]

The premise of the movie was spot on. The cinema photography could have been better.

[C]

I love that. Just like even the people that they this movie is catering to explicitly cannot call it an outright good movie.

[B]

No, and I don't think they're necessarily cinephiles either. And they're just universally like, not a great movie. The film would have died as a direct to VOD flop without one man. Elon Musk's team directly contacted Uwe through his podcast who relayed this message.

[A]

They told me like we got a message from Elon Musk. I thought that it must be a parody account. I mean you're not really thinking that he would contact you. But then it turned out it was true.

[B]

Bol gave him permission to release the film on X for 48 hours for free. Posted from Musk's account.

[A]

It was tagged the movie Hollywood doesn't want you to see.

[B]

Musk's post drew somewhere between 10.5 to 15 million views and Ball's another 5 million. So he got about probably 20 million watches from these posts. Someone please read this tweet and the

[D]

quote tweet of it Libs of TikTok says Citizen Vigilante has now surpassed the Michael movie and is number two on Apple tv. Germany banned it and now the richest person in the world shared it and it's shattering records.

[B]

And who quote tweeted it Elon Musk

[A]

and he says Citizen Vigilante 2 will be even better, of course because it'll be financed by Elon Musk who's like, of course I could. Yes, I'd like to make a movie. Quote, yes, of course. How many million do you need?

[D]

I'm surprised there hasn't been more. Like I feel like there started to be kind of chud films specifically for a pilled audience a couple of years ago, but I feel like it's taken off less than I would have expected.

[B]

Yes, because the artistry is not there. Yeah, Bull leaned into all of this tweeting.

[A]

Keep watching Citizen Vigilante and we can start shooting Part two soon.

[B]

And then the poster is, it says Citizen Vigilante 2 and there's an American flag behind him. And the subtitle is the end of Somali Scam. So the implication here is that he's going to come to to Minneapolis to

[C]

shoot Somalis kill some Somalian families.

[B]

So the usual boosters lined up, sir, Doge of the coin, failed politician Valentina Gomez, Jack Bosobiek, Libs of TikTok, Patrick Bet David, Tommy Robinson and on and on and on. I came across this post from a Musk obsessed man with many flags in his bio.

[D]

Elon, we need to create a based film festival in response to the Oscars where we showcase films like Citizen Vigilante, non woke independent filmmakers and Grok Imagine artists. I would be happy to organize it, make cinema great again.

[C]

They already know that they don't have enough artists without the use of AI. Like they have to include the AI guys.

[B]

Yeah. I had to click through this guy's account and found this other post which has nothing to do with Citizen Vigilante. But the level of obsession with Elon Musk is amazing here.

[D]

So he's retweeted his own tweet and says, Elon, I started a series where you a polar bear and I go on adventures all across the world using Grok 4.5 and blending it with real photos that I take and then a heart.

[A]

What about the polar bear? Why the polar bear? What's going on with that?

[B]

Yeah, it's a photo of him and. And a very sort of young, masculine looking Elon with a polar bear behind them doing the bunny ears. Very cute.

[A]

Poor Elon. And the polar bear replacing in these pictures or was nobody there to begin with?

[B]

Yeah, I wonder. His family, Tristan Tate begged ove for a role in the sequel and here's his quote.

[C]

I'll do it for free. I'LL pay for my own flights, but I'd like to be in Citizen Vigilante too. It was 10 out of 10.

[B]

And Roger Avery, who is the Oscar winning co writer of PUL Fiction, asked,

[D]

is Paul the boldest and bravest auteur working in cinema today?

[B]

Bull thanked him in a video with thanks, Roger Avery.

[A]

You are not a pussy. As all the other people who are

[D]

shy to speak out, which is awesome. It's like animosity towards people. All the people who presumably like him but are too afraid to say anything about it.

[B]

Yeah, very funny. If any of these people were to actually reflect on the film, though, I think they'd come to a different conclusion. I mean, Sanders is obviously written as a psychopath. He himself is a violent illegal immigran and a landlord profiting from brothels and slums that mostly kills cops and some white people who are in his way. And so through this lens, it almost reads as satire. And Slate's Rebecca Onion put it well,

[C]

some anti migrant film fans who actually watch Citizen Vigilante may find themselves a little underwhelmed by how few asylum seekers die in the film. In the rest of the movie, Sanders actually mostly kills cops, a detail that turns off some right wing viewers.

[B]

And how does Mr. Hammer feel about his comeback to her role? The website Puck, quoting a single anonymous source, so take this with many grains of salt, reported that Armie was not happy. Here's the quote.

[A]

The first time he saw it, he was in tears. He called me and said, fuck, this is hateful, disgusting. When he saw the final product, he was, that was not the movie I thought we made. And he freaked the fuck out.

[B]

It's like, come on, Army. Like, he read the script, he said all the lines, did all the. The actions. I don't see where any confusion comes from that to seeing the final film, because it's not like some magic was made in the edit that made it a completely different film.

[A]

Radical Islam is said, or Islamic extremism is said multiple times in the movie.

[B]

And then he's done a bunch of interviews gushing about the experience.

[C]

Yeah, I think he thought this would be like Bloodrayne or the Christian Slater one. You're kind of in a bad movie, but it's a bit of a memeable director and you're kind of back in the biz again. I don't think he realized that it was. I don't think he realized basically the content of what was in the film was going to become public knowledge essentially to anybody other than a Few kind of like people who find Uv Boll funny.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. He didn't think Elon Musk would be tweeting it out and it would become like one of the most talked about films of the last month or the summer even. And yeah, it's just so unfortunate that this is the state of things right now.

[A]

That's a great model, by the way, is that UV Uwe Bolg puts his PayPal like account public and he gets like, Elon basically like to tweet out, you know, as free advertising. Between that cutting out like all middle people and then premiering the movie on, on Twitter or whatever is actually, there's no reason that that model, like, it won't continue to work for them if they actually give a shit and are smart about it. I'm. I'm curious to see if Citizen Vigilante 2 will materialize, but given Bol's work ethic, I feel like it probably will. It'll probably be better and it'll probably gain more traction because like video games and Bol's movies, the sequels are always better than the original.

[B]

But yeah, apparently he actually, like, this has now been enough of a financial and media success that it's confirmed already. Number two in that same Puck article, this anonymous source asked army if he would do the sequel, even after saying he cried after watching because it was so hateful. And he said, well, if it was a life changing amount of money, I would do it.

[D]

I like the idea that he accidentally starts a right wing rift. Like he, like he didn't mean to, but he's like, well, the money's here.

[B]

Yeah, right?

[A]

Yeah. I mean, isn't 250k like a life changing amount of money? Like, I don't know, is he spoiled?

[B]

I think not. If you were used to having millions and having like a palace in la.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, he comes from like this billionaire American dynasty. Armie Hammer, right?

[A]

Oh, yeah, that's right. That's. That's right.

[B]

Yeah. But breaking news just announced and Jake's gonna be excited about this.

[A]

Oh, boy.

[B]

In the wake of all the press frenzy, Bolt announced that a PlayStation 5 video game of Citizen Vigilante will be released. It's gonna be released in just a few days, July 17th on the PlayStation Store.

[A]

Wow. I love this, by the way. I think this is how all video games should be released is. Tell me like three days before it comes out. I'm like, oh, my God. God, I will buy it. Whatever it is, I'll buy it. Don't make Me wait years and years and years and years and years only to be disappointed that the game is kind of like a weird relationship simulator.

[B]

Yeah, but yeah, bull Movie getting its own shitty game adaptation is. That's a first. And it's a kind of poetry, I feel like. But. But yeah, here's the trailer for the game, which is.

[A]

I can't believe it's already up on the. It's already up on the PlayStation Store. It's like made by one guy. And like, at first it was unclear if it was like an official tie in or like, he just made it.

[B]

I do think you're gonna hear this VO which is just lifted from the film. And I'm quite sure this is AI audio.

[A]

Fantastic.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All right, here we go. Everything I do, I do for you. I can't sit here and watch the system stay asleep for our system anymore. The truth is you're all stay asleep for our system anymore.

[B]

Hold on, let's try this again.

[A]

I can't sit here and watch the system stay of sleep for our system anymore. The truth is you're all being used. The police won't protect you. I have to protect you. And if the courts and laws don't give you justice, I will give you justice.

[C]

Remember?

[B]

Jake, what do you think of the graphics?

[A]

They don't look that bad. Do it for yourself.

[B]

And here he is in the game also killing migrants.

[A]

Just like popping heads off. Guys, it looks okay. If the state, the courts, the police, sp. We need to come in and correct injustice. You need to stop getting abused and used as a tool. Instead you will take control so they will be the victims they never dreamed they ever could be. So all of you, you who care about injustice, correct it. Go out there and show all these fuckers that they are not getting away with.

[D]

Turns into a rallying cry to kill Muslim people at the end.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And this is in the PlayStation Store. When you let the trailer play it, like, it gets louder. And he's like, we're not gonna let these fuckers take over. Like, that is crazy that they got that through. I don't think any other trailer has, like. I don't know, it's like an explicit F. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. But to me, maybe I'm an old guy, but.

[B]

So, yeah, that's. That's it, guys. By the way, I don't have anything

[A]

in that video game. In that video game, it seems like every headshot, like, pops the guy's head off.

[C]

Like, I noticed that. Just everyone's Head was coming off.

[A]

Everyone's head is popping off like a giant fountain of blood. Like, to me, that game kind of looks like the old, like, Soldier of Fortune games, which were just like really gratuitously gory, just for gores sake, like almost comically so. And I would play this one for those grounds, but it looks bad. The animations look shitty. I mean, it's probably just a bunch of like, you know, flipped unreal assets or something like, you know, AI whatever.

[B]

So that's. That's it, guys. I'm sorry to have put all of you through this. My fellow co hosts and the audience.

[A]

I think this episode is going to be longer than like, the movie itself. Maybe even like this. It might be longer than like two Uwe Boll movies, like, on top of each other.

[C]

So it was certainly better researched as well. I would say.

[D]

Yes.

[C]

Probably more time went into this script than the Citizen Vigilante script itself.

[B]

Yeah, I just. I hope we've done a service here today.

[A]

I think we absolutely have. This feels like a new. This feels like a hashtag new classic.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.comqaa and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second premium episode for every regular episode, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. For everything else, we've got a podcast. Wait, no, we've got a website, which is qaapodcast.com. annie, where can people find more of your work?

[C]

You can mostly find me. I don't really post much on Twitter these days, but I am on bluesky. I also wanted to say this is probably going to be my last episode for QAA for a little while because I'm going on maternity leave.

[D]

No.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Actually, congratulations.

[A]

No plus yes.

[C]

But I promise I will be back.

[A]

It's good. I mean, Travis, it's too late for him. But if any QAA host should be creating life, it's definitely. It should be you, Annie. I think truly, truly one of the best of us. And you will be. You will be missed. But we are, you know, we're so lucky to have you. And we'll see you when you're back.

[C]

Oh, that means a lot. Yeah. Just gonna keep making national babies. Yeah.

[A]

As a national baby yourself, you have an obligation to your country and to the queen.

[C]

That's my patriotic duty. That's right.

[A]

Liv, where can people find more of your work?

[D]

I have a Twitch Stream, Twitch tv and a newsletter. Dot com, Brad.

[A]

And where can people find more of

[B]

your stuff on Instagram, I'm BradWTF. On Twitter, I am Lovin Saucers. And I have a website too. It's just my name, bradabrahams.net go check it out, folks.

[A]

Go check out everybody's stuff and their sites and their letters and their blue sky posts. Everybody's making good content except for me. Don't find me anywhere except right here next week. And until then, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.

[E]

We have auto keyed content based on your preferences.

[A]

In my film, he goes against criminals. Not Moss flames criminals. And I don't. He murdered an entire family.

[C]

So.

[A]

And that's a signal.

[B]

He killed.

[A]

That's not true. U so no, he killed the entire family.

[B]

U.

[A]

You're lying. He killed the entire family. What are you talking about? No, no, no, I'm not lying. He shoots the entire family. Was the girl a criminal? Was his sister a criminal? No, but she was okay with the rape and she saw the rape as a witness. So.

[E]

And of.

[A]

So you support killing people for having views you don't like? Don't. Don't forget it's a fictional movie. It's a fictional movie and in the. You're talking in reality life now, you're saying he killed only criminals. I pointed out he didn't kill only criminals. And you said, but she had it coming. You said. Basically what you say is that it doesn't really matter. It was just a random Syrian family. He goes in and executes them.

[D]

Total.

[A]

I didn't say random. You're lying. I specifically said the son was rapist and he killed the entire family. And that clip is being shown as a moderate response. I've said this multiple times. That clip has been used online as

[B]

a moderate as well.

[A]

You should condemn that. Well, you should condemn it. You should condemn it. If I made something, if I wrote something that was being used by far right people to incite violence, I would say the. The reality is that the people are fed up with the situation. How it is the migration, which is the people. You don't speak for the people.