The movie Europe doesn’t want you to see

“Citizen Vigilante” serves as a warning to governments that if they don’t secure their borders, enforce laws and protect their most vulnerable, then ordinary people will resort to self-help

Thane Rosenbaum

Movie audiences everywhere await the premiere of Christopher Nolan’s star-studded summer blockbuster, “The Odyssey,” featuring Matt Damon. Meanwhile, another movie, “Citizen Vigilante,” helmed by a largely unknown German director and starring Armie Hammer, who suffered the cancellation consequences of #MeToo, failed to get a commercial release.

Nonetheless, “Citizen Vigilante” tops Amazon’s VOD streaming list at No. 1 and has received a 94% Rotten Tomatoes audience score. Other platforms are streaming the film with similar audience enthusiasm.

A tale of two movies depicting Europe: one centered in Ancient Greece; the other delving into the dark side of today’s continent. In “The Odyssey,” a victorious general tries to make his way home after 10 years at war and another decade in a brutal journey back. “Citizen Vigilante” is about how an entire homeland can be surrendered to foreigners who violently take over the mores of a civilization, are placated by cowardly governments and assured that their crimes will go unpunished.

“The Odyssey” is about the aftermath of war; “Citizen Vigilante” is about a war to come, where citizens must decide whether they are prepared to reclaim their nations and ensure the safety of their families.

For this reason, “Citizen Vigilante” is the true thriller and truth-teller of the summer. If you can see only one movie, skip the lines at the multiplex, forgo the IMAX technology and contemplate a “Mad Max” morality. Expose yourself to a fictional tale that is looking all too real each day—and will soon be playing at a theater near you.

Not a movie theater, but a theater of war on city streets.

“Citizen Vigilante” is no cinematic achievement. It’s low-budget, self-financed fare. Grimly lit. Poorly plotted. And no score or soundtrack to speak of. Hammer, always compelling, is no longer a matinée “star.” No matter how many times the movie gets streamed, a career comeback is not likely from this performance.

And yet, he should be congratulated for taking on both the project and the risk. Germany banned the movie outright. The rest of Western Europe is withholding popcorn. What reviews exist are uniformly critical. The establishment—governments, mainstream media, academia—view “Citizen Vigilante” as xenophobic, racist propaganda.

Europeans who have watched the movie, however, are seeing something else: an ominous reflection through a mirror that isn’t resorting to movie magic to dispel a dire situation. They know it’s an awful movie, but so is the condition of the continent it depicts—the one they must navigate cautiously with their lives.

Europe is suffering from moral decay and cultural rot. “Citizen Vigilante,” a feature film, projects the shadows of a documentary: raw, intimate and all too familiar.

A young mother is killed—nearly beheaded—by a migrant in front of her son. A young girl is gang-raped by five Muslim boys. Young migrants bully and rob a younger boy soon after refusing to pay their fares on a bus. Thousands refuse to pay their rent despite receiving government subsidies. A Muslim father excuses his teenage son’s participation in a sexual assault because it is permitted in the Quran. The sister of the rapist blames the victim for the way she is dressed.

The movie showcases the disgraceful and hapless European legal system that either ignores or shifts the blame for criminal behavior. The failure of immigrants to assimilate is, dumbfoundingly, the fault of Europeans: “Our politics failed to integrate or get them help to function and obey our rules,” the judge explains. “Traumatic integration” is framed as an exonerating legal argument. Cultural differences are the real culprits. Rapists are victims, too.

Meanwhile, the news media reports on the exploits of Hammer’s righteous vigilante as he takes down not only the criminals, but the judges who coddle them. He accepts no excuses, bluntly telling one of the Muslims who explains why asylum was necessary: “I think it’s not the good ones who got out of your country; it was the bad ones.”

He becomes a folk hero for taking justice into his own hands. Aided by face-blurring and voice-distorting technology, he tells Europeans that he will continue to serve as their avenger until ordinary citizens are willing to defend themselves.

“Citizen Vigilante” taps into Europe’s hushed buyer’s remorse over accepting far too many refugees from Syria’s civil war and other war-torn Muslim nations. The movie dares Europeans to deal harshly with those who have been making their lives miserable for years now.

European governments, for this reason, simply hate it. Elected officials have refused to admit their mistakes in welcoming so many who do not appreciate welfare handouts and want nothing to do with infidels who worship Jesus Christ.

And thanks for making it easier to kill Jews living in Europe. It’s nearly impossible to pick off bad-ass Israelis back home in the Middle East.

“Citizen Vigilante” comes from the same cinematic universe that spawned some of Hollywood’s classic revenge movies, like “Dirty Harry,” “Taxi Driver” and “Death Wish,” a movie that literally forced New Yorkers of the 1970s to decide whether it was time to reclaim their city and subways from muggers, murderers, rapists, gangs and looters.

I know a little something about revenge movies. I wrote a book years ago, Payback: The Case for Revenge, in which, among other things, I argue that filmmakers do a much better job than judges in making justice real and victims feel whole.

In every good film about vengeance, the legal system is given the first opportunity to mete out justice—fairly and thoroughly. Once the legal system fails, however, or is complicit in the crime, an avenger, often ambivalently, enters the picture and takes justice into his or her hands because no one else was willing to do it and the moral universe demands it.

“An eye for an eye” is not a call for bloodlust, but a demand for precision: measure for measure. Taking more than an eye leads to the recycling of violence. But payback requires getting even—to receive less as repayment when more is owed is not justice, either.

Due to moral relativism, identity politics and the self-debasement of white Westerners, we live in societies where sensitivities toward the accused count more than the grief of victims—whose losses are trivialized, their agony dismissed and where wrongdoers go under-punished.

It is the consequence of living in a culture where merely offending people is deemed a capital offense (unless those people are Jewish). Where calling attention to the moral failings of brown people is a war crime. Where spin doctors become tongue-tied in excusing the indefensible violence from those who don’t know how to behave as guests.

“Citizen Vigilante” serves as a warning to governments that if they don’t secure their borders, enforce laws and protect their most vulnerable, ordinary people will resort to self-help.

It’s an honest movie, which is exactly why leftist European governments and “progressives” who dominate the film industry don’t want citizens to see it.

And that’s precisely why it must be seen.

Originally published in the “Jewish Journal.”

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. His most recent book is Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza. jns, 14-7-2026

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Citizen Vigilante