Have you ever wondered whatever happened to Uwe Boll, the eccentric German director who make a splash in the early 2000s, when many considered him the worst director who ever lived? He disappeared from the scene for a few years and had no IMDb credits from 2017-2021, but he’s back, and he directed this film. He also wrote and produced.
Have you ever wondered whatever happened to Armie Hammer, the handsome actor whose career got derailed when people found out about some of his dark personal peccadillos? His weird fetishes could have been overlooked, but he was also accused of a brutal rape. The LAPD had to drop the criminal case because there was no evidence, but the mainstream industry was not as forgiving as the legal system. He became a pariah, was banished from major projects, and has to get work where he can find it. He’s the star of this film, as the vigilante
Have you ever wondered whatever happened to Costas Mandylor, who seemed to be in every movie in the 1990s that came from the hyphen universe? (Made-for-cable and straight-to-video.) He now has a scaled-down version of an Eric Roberts career, flying around the world for whatever work may be available to a 60-year-old man who used to be a grade-B character actor in his 30s. In other words, he gets the roles that are turned down by Eric Roberts, but only if Michael Pare also refuses them. He’s the second lead in this film, as the cop who has sworn to bring the vigilante to justice, and fails mightily in that endeavor.
As for Alona Hertha, she’s a petite woman who resembles Rosie Perez, and was a fairly popular nude model. (A Google search finds plenty of frontals from German Playboy and other sources.) As you know, 40 is 80 in nude model years, so she has seen the handwriting on the wall as she approaches her 40th birthday, and therefore hopes to expand her options by acting. She is still very trim, and there is still some demand for women who will do movie nude scenes. She plays a hooker in this film, in a sex scene the goes on for five minutes and has nothing to do with the rest of the film. (And the entire movie is only 89 minutes long, including the opening and closing credits. Hey, Uwe isn’t such a bad director. At least he knows what’s important!)
As for the movie – it’s a Charles Bronson movie re-imagined as a high-level right-wing fantasy. A very rich man decides that he is going to bring justice to everyone in an unnamed European country (filmed in Croatia) who has been harmed by Europe’s wishy-washy liberal immigration policies. He sets about building himself a private arsenal and fortress-like bunkers, whereupon he takes to the street to kill various Africans and Middle Easterners who have gotten away with violent crimes. While he’s at it, he also starts killing the judges who set these criminals free, and the people who show sympathy for the criminals on social media.
When an army of SWAT policemen come for him, he kills all of them as well. He’s filthy rich, remember. He kills the first two waves of policemen by machine-gunning them them his impregnable bunker. He then escapes through a secret tunnel, and blows up the remaining policemen when they try to follow him. He also comes to a “happy” ending. As the film ends, he has never been caught, and makes a speech about how immigrants have destroyed Europe, how he hopes to continue his work, and how he hopes to motivate “the people” to join in his murderous mission. The blackout is followed by word slides detailing the number of rapes and murders committed by immigrants in Europe. Suffice it to say, if Stephen Miller knew about this film, he would watch it every night, masturbating furiously!
SIDEBAR: Uwe is a provocateur, and his films usually have some touches of dark, transgressive humor, but the only indication that anyone involved with the film has a sense of humor is that one of the judges killed by the vigilante is a 70ish man called Judge Reinhold!
She’s much hotter than Rosie. Hooker with Arnie as a client should get hazard pay.
Too bad they couldn’t get Judge Reinhold to play Judge Reinhold. The Rosie Perez comparison for Hertha is dead on, though agree Alona is hotter.
And whenever I think of Miller, I already picture him masturbating furiously, so he could skip this film.
This sounds…surprisingly watchable for an Uwe Boll movie
It is surprisingly well directed. The photography is crisp, and it uses the images very effectively to support the narrative. For example, it showed where the characters were in relation to one another when the SWAT team stormed the bunker. And the U man did edit the film properly to maintain tension in each of the vigilante’s confrontations.
My only quibble with the direction was his overuse of cutaways to past or future events, even in the middle of action scenes that were holding my attention.
That was a roundabout way of saying your comment is spot-on. If I change your word “watchable” to “competent,” I was thinking the same thing myself. The writing is repulsive, but the direction is surprisingly competent.