Provo director Uwe Boll and Elon Musk: An ugly alternative against Germany

For 48 hours, Musk released Uwe Boll’s full-length vigilante thriller “Citizen Vigilante” on X after the notoriously controversial director previously asked him for help on the platform. The German film industry’s voluntary self-regulation did not give his film an age rating almost a month ago. However, without an FSK rating, the chances of commercial exploitation, for example on streaming platforms or in cinemas, are extremely low. The film, like so many other Boll creations before it, threatened to disappear unnoticed.

However, the testing center is not subordinate to any ministry, but simply an instrument for the protection of minors in the film industry. Boll nevertheless suspected censorship, a conspiracy by the political-industrial entertainment complex. The reason: His film is about an American businessman, played by Armie Hammer (“Call Me By Your Name”), who has been classified as unemployable in Hollywood for five years due to allegations of sexual abuse, and who sets out on a campaign of revenge against criminal migrants somewhere in “Europe”.

The compromised public prosecutor’s office is also targeted by the “Dark Knight”. The Batman rights holders understandably had a problem with this originally planned film title. In the end credits of “Citizen Vigilante,” Boll now dedicates it to the “thousands of rape victims and murdered people who were betrayed by the justice system.”

Like an image film for an AfD campaign

With tough stuff – speculative violence, misogyny and a reactionary world view – Uwe Boll has made a name for himself in trash cinema fan circles. In political terms, “Citizen Vigilante” is significantly more uninhibited than his previous video game adaptations and, in their technical clumsiness, rather unintentionally funny genre films. The last part of his “Germany in Winter” trilogy could easily pass as an image film for an AfD campaign.

In the opening scene, a blonde woman has a butcher knife rammed into her neck on the street by a dark-looking black man in front of her child. Splatter expert Boll knows how to stir up fear in his audience. The higher the fountains of blood spray, the more urgent his (not just artistic) concerns become.

And 61-year-old Boll could be sure that Musk’s call for help would be heard. Without the intervention of the boss of Thanks to Musk, the film now has the audience that Boll was hoping for with his provocation.

The enterprising do-it-yourself filmmaker doesn’t have to believe that his protagonist’s monologues are just the role prose of a problematic character, as Boll claims. The relevant jargon from the fermenting swamp of social media is used too frequently in the script. In his pixelated confessional videos, American Psycho talks about “population exchange” and the danger of left-wing wokeness. The generic news channel World News spreads false crime statistics.

The FSK is trying to deny reality by removing his film, which reveals the truth about Germany in 2026, from circulation, explains Boll in an interview with the “Berliner Zeitung” on Friday. In this way, according to the director, politics and its institutions are complicit in the growing frustration and radicalization of the German population. Because: “Mass rape is largely committed by young migrants.”

With “Citizen Vigilante,” Uwe Boll has added a mean-spirited punchline to the bitter debate about “artistic freedom” that has raged in the German cultural scene. The director actually sees his film in a lineage with “Taxi Driver”, “Natural Born Killers” and “John Wick”. On a par with fearless, radical filmmakers.

For this self-assessment, you probably have to feel sorry for Armie Hammer most of all, who recently raved about his comeback in the US trade publication “Variety”. Despite Elon Musk, that has probably been postponed until further notice.