Citizen Vigilante is an ugly film. It has been banned in Germany, viewed by millions of people on X, and is currently the number one film in North America on major streaming platforms. It can’t be avoided, and it shouldn’t be.

In some ways the low-budget action film stands in a familiar genre of vigilante movies. Think Death Wish (1974) or John Wick (2014). If the setting were different, the leading man might have been Liam Neeson. But director Uwe Boll’s leading man is Armie Hammer, making his first appearance since one of the crazier #MeToo cancellations. And that is because Citizen Vigilante is meant to be—and is—controversial. It is set in present-day Europe, where crimes are committed every day by some of the millions of illegal migrants who have recently arrived on the continent, even though Europe’s politicians and cultural elites would rather ignore them.

The film opens with a beautiful German mother being stabbed in the neck by a migrant after leaving a supermarket with her young child. It closes—if you don’t mind the spoiler—with the antihero protagonist going to the house of a young Syrian man who has been involved in the gang-rape of a local girl.