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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Peter Bradshaw

Citizen Vigilante review – Armie Hammer returns to obliterate the imaginary woke piñata of Europe-stan

Armie Hammer in a black hoodie stands behind a camera on a tripod, with a green screen and monitor visible
Embarrassingly badly acted … Armie Hammer as Sanders in Citizen Vigilante, 2026. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

Oh, Armie Hammer! Has it come to this? It doesn’t seem that long since you were in the Oscar-winning film Call Me By Your Name giving a sensitive liberal performance opposite Timothée Chalamet. Now here you are, striding around the streets and public parks of Zagreb, shooting Muslims, tasering teens and topping complicit deep-state judges to protest against what your character robustly describes as an “unfriendly takeover by Islamist extremists and the blind-sided woke left”.

Much has happened to this once garlanded actor and great-grandson of oil tycoon Armand Hammer. His reputation plummeted after allegations of sexual assault by former partners in 2021, relationships that Hammer has maintained were consensual. Criminal charges were since dropped for lack of evidence, Hammer has now returned to the silver screen – and here he is in a very cheap, incoherent and embarrassingly badly acted schlocker, written, produced and directed by Germany’s low-budget exploitation maestro Uwe Boll, which cannibalises all manner of revenge tropes. More importantly, the film has been promoted and publicised globally online with monumental hypocrisy by Elon Musk who like JD Vance is very keen to divert America’s attention from its own issues to the fiercely imagined lawless migrant-caliphate of Europe-stan. It’s another piece of shit to flood the zone.

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