Armie Hammer and Uwe Boll’s Ugly Thriller

After decades of cinema chronicling men taking the law into their own hands when “the system” fails them, a thoughtful reckoning is warranted — if not necessary — about the costs, and complex morality, of vigilantism. A handful of films have tried, but when one of the world’s most popular comic book characters is Batman, critiquing extrajudicial “heroism” feels like tilting at windmills. Yet Uwe Boll’s “Citizen Vigilante,” whose original title somewhat ironically was “The Dark Knight,” manages to be so indulgent and incurious a portrait of a man exacting vengeance that calling it wish-fulfillment feels irresponsible.

Boll, a cinematic embarrassment since the early 2000s, here delivers a violent, incoherent, morally bankrupt slice of exploitation on the same qualitative level as “House of the Dead,” “Alone in the Dark” and “BloodRayne.” In fact, the film is so astonishingly bad, it almost feels like the writer-director-producer is deliberately sabotaging his star Armie Hammer, whose intended comeback can only be harmed by this project.

Hammer plays Sanders, an American living abroad in a country that — according to him — has been overrun by criminal migrants. A title card splashes “EUROPE” across the screen in capital letters, but without further geographical context, it’s difficult to know which accented character actors are good guys and which are bad. Boll helpfully clarifies by opening the film with a scene in which a hooded black man kills a mother in front of her son in broad daylight, and later depicts a confrontation where the parents of a rapist insist they are teaching their son the values of the Quran.

Sanders’ identity is a secret, much to the consternation of Interpol chief Henry (Costas Mandylor). But he has become a viral sensation worldwide, watching influencers sing his praises when he’s not recording blurred-face manifestos about a legal system that protects criminals and re-traumatizes victims. Funding his acts of revenge with the rent he extracts from tenants in a network of properties inherited from his late father, Sanders controls his family business with the same exactitude that he judges evildoers. But after a chance encounter at a bar where Sanders is the owner, Henry finds himself one step closer to apprehending this mysterious avenging angel, even if the local citizens are supportive enough of his activities that they don’t seem to want him caught.

No matter how much affection one may have for vigilante films — from genre standard-bearers like “Dirty Harry,” “Taxi Driver” and “Rolling Thunder” to any of a dozen Jason Statham actioners — Boll makes it extremely difficult to be charitable to “Citizen Vigilante,” even as the cheapest grindhouse fare. It is pointlessly nonlinear, and really has no plot except for Sanders to persuade victims of violent crimes that his form of punishment will be more cathartic than what the legal system can provide, and then enact it with as much firepower and brutality as possible. Boll seems to use every second of footage he recorded on the film (often multiple times) to pad it to feature length, as if he watched Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” and decided that following actors through every single moment of an activity somehow imbues it with the meaning his script clearly lacks.

Hammer’s character is as xenophobic and entitled as the broadest American stereotype, gnashing his teeth over foreign bogeymen and wagging his silencer-ed handgun at perceived offenders while delivering self-righteous monologues about the downstream societal repercussions of criminality. Even if the actor’s private behavior has rendered him largely unhireable in the U.S., Hammer was at least a skilled and charismatic performer at his career peak, and little of that spark is visible as he recites Boll’s prejudiced screeds. Meanwhile, Mandylor exudes a world-weariness that neither he nor Boll ever pairs with any sense of urgency to catch an enigmatic killer who leaves behind so much evidence in his wake — from fingerprints to recorded videos featuring his thinly disguised face and voice — that it seems harder not to find him.

After being legally prohibited from using its original, DC-inspired title, one wonders why Boll chose such a bland, nondescript title when “The Landlord” was right there; Sanders is so committed to his responsibilities as a property owner that he stops a liaison with a sex worker mid-thrust to scold her about the mold growing on the walls above her bed. Then again, the flat, forgettable pairing of words chosen to replace “The Dark Knight” speaks to Boll’s originality and imagination as a filmmaker.

Concluding with a dedication to “rape victims in Europe who were betrayed by our legal system,” “Citizen Vigilante” is a film that disguises its exploitation roots behind the pretense of exploring an important topic, even as it proceeds to treat that subject completely inappropriately. Between Boll and Hammer, it’s hard to know who gets the worse deal in hitching his wagon to the other’s star. But any of those victims to whom it purports to pay tribute would be better served looking elsewhere for a champion than to mistake this shameless exercise in ambulance-chasing for an earnest pursuit of justice.