Armie Hammer's new film 'Citizen Vigilante' is banned in Germany and its director says it will inspire real-world vigilante killings

The film cost two to three million dollars, stars Armie Hammer, and is currently sitting near the top of Apple’s movie charts. It is also banned in Germany, refused a rating for inciting violence against migrants, and its director lost a 6-2 legal vote to get it certified. Patrick Bet-David watched it, loved it, and went on air to say a real person will see it and start murdering rapists within three to six months. He did not say this as a criticism of the film. He said it like he was reading a weather forecast.

The movie, called ‘Citizen Vigilante,’ follows a wealthy, rootless man who witnesses his mother stabbed to death in the street as a child and grows up to become a one-man execution squad targeting sex criminals the justice system refuses to punish. The specific plot engine that has people talking: a Muslim teenager and his friends gang-rape a 15-year-old girl, the boy’s mother posts on social media that the girl deserved it because of what she was wearing, and Armie Hammer’s character responds by killing every single member of the family and then each of the seven friends, one by one. Then he injects a judge with heroin and kills him too, because the judge suggested the rapists were also victims. It is not subtle.

This is an unfair takeover by Islamic extremists and the woke left. That’s a line in the movie from him. Army Hammer, you end this or we the people end it ourselves.

The Prediction Nobody Should Be Comfortable With

Bet-David is not a fringe figure. He has millions of subscribers and sits at a table that routinely hosts presidential candidates and Fortune 500 names. So when he says, with total calm, that this movie will inspire actual killings, that lands differently than a random comment section. He name-drops Tommy Robinson as a comparator, then says the next wave will be worse than Robinson because they will skip the activism and go straight to Gambino-family logic. The reference is a bit jumbled but the point is not.

This is one of the darkest movies I’ve seen that’s gonna inspire actual vigilantes who are sick of it in Europe.

He is not wrong that the film is tapping into something real. The grooming gang scandal in the UK, the failures of successive governments to prosecute or even acknowledge the scale of it, the arrest of a woman who shamed one of the convicted rapists on WhatsApp while the rapists themselves walked, all of that is documented and genuinely enraging. The film’s director, who rose to notoriety for what critics called notoriously bad video game adaptations before this project, is clearly a true believer rather than a cynical provocateur. He said publicly: ‘I hired a lawyer to complain about it, but we lost in a 6-2 vote as I was told that the film was inciting violence against migrants.’ He does not seem chastened by this. Neither does Bet-David.

Death Wish in a Hoodie

The co-host reaches for the right reference when he brings up ‘Death Wish,’ the 1974 Charles Bronson film where an architect becomes a street vigilante after his wife is killed and his daughter is assaulted. That movie made Bronson a star, terrified critics, and was embraced by a New York City that genuinely felt like it was losing a war against crime. The police chief at the end of that film tells Bronson’s character he will not be arrested because crime is down across the city and asks him simply to leave town. The crowd cheered. The parallel to ‘Citizen Vigilante’ is real and Bet-David is right to draw it.

What he glosses over is what ‘Death Wish’ actually taught us: the vigilante fantasy is most seductive precisely when institutions are most broken, and the seduction does not fix the institutions. It just makes the fantasy more urgent next time. Elon Musk posting the entire film for free on X, which Bet-David mentions approvingly, is not a free speech gesture. It is an accelerant dropped on a conversation that is already running very hot.

If only 50 people watch this that have nothing to lose, they’re going to do some shit.

The honest version of this episode is a guy who is genuinely moved and disturbed by the movie, saying something true, that a lot of people in Europe are past the point of polite frustration, and something reckless, that a film predicting this will happen is therefore a good movie to hand to those people. Those are not the same argument. Bet-David knows the difference. He just does not stop at the first one.