I watched this so you don’t have to waste your time. It’s an objectively bad movie.
There’s no actual plot or emotional arc or character development or even an actual story to follow. After an intro scene where a murder is committed it cuts to news segments about the citizen vigilante. So it’s not like a Death Wish where there’s revenge for a family member. He’s just apparently became mad about things (offscreen) and decided to do something about it. After that, there are a couple of scenes where he goes after a criminal and the the movie decides to end.
The movie just says ‘Europe’ for the setting (it looks like Croatia). Other than Armie Hammer the rest of the cast must be locals. All the dialogue is in English, but has heavy accents. So everything kind of sound stilted.
The movie is 1hr 30min and they padded it as much as they could. Throughout the movie there must be at least 10 minutes worth of scenes where the vigilante is standing over a table loading guns and looking at his knives. Another 10 minutes worth of random social media videos where people say they agree with the vigilante and say things like “I wish he was in my country”. And another 10 minutes of SWAT trucks rolling down the street and breaching a building. So much of the movie is basically B roll like that.
Another half hour of the movie is just the vigilante making social media style posts. Some of them he has his face pixelated. It’s nothing profound. Mostly teenage edgelord stuff.
The vigilante isn’t even portrayed as a good guy. He admits he’s an illegal immigrant. He intentionally breaks the law in his business. He has an odd obsession with the state of his buildings and he mentions a poor relationship with his fathers, both of which never go anywhere. He literally murders a bunch of police officers, and then murders an entire family as part of his seeking justice for the crimes of the son.
So, it’s a bad movie. The effects a pretty bad. There’s one particularly bloody scene where he kills a bunch of people and the effects a pretty low budget. It’s not really a watchable movie. It’s Uwe Boll, nobody should have expected anything else.
As for the controversial parts of the movie I’ll put it in spoilers:
After the intro scene: The intro scene shows the criminal as black and the news segment specifically mentions African immigrants and points out that ‘we need to question whether immigration is worth the cost’
And the last scene:
This is where he murders an immigrant family. It’s a story pulled from the headlines in Germany where a girl was raped and the youths weren’t given jail time. The vigilante says some very specific ideological rhetoric, stuff like ‘they only send us the bad ones’. And the final scene specifically blames things on the ‘woke left’. The news segements again talk about migrants causing problems. And in his social media posts at the end, the vigilante says a lot of things like ‘you need to take back control’.
I think the movie was done that way intentionally and manipulatively. Because other than the beginning and the end, most of the movies doesn’t specifically deal with political issues. There are some allusions to the government not wanting to do anything about the problem and are more interested in going after the vigilante. But most of the bad guys are just sort of random people and not really from any demographic. So it seems like the controversial issue was done at the very beginning to draw in a particular audience, and then added on to the end to make sure people stick around to watch the popular controversial scene. And then, of course, Uwe Boll really played up how the movie was banned to shut him down.
Nobody should be recommending this movie. Even if they agree with the politics of it, they should not be recommending it without the caveat that it’s a bad movie that’s a waste of time. And it’s particuarly hypocritical for any influencer to recommend this movie if they’ve ever complained about inserting politics into movies or that all they really care about is watching good movies.