German director Uwe Boll is infamous for his so-bad-they’re-actually-just-bad movie adaptations of video games like Bloodrayne, Postal, and House of the Dead. Now, in a surprising twist, Boll’s latest single-digit-score Rotten Tomatoes movie is getting an official video game adaptation. It’s perfectly timed to capitalize on the controversy surrounding the filmmaker’s new pic, Citizen Vigilante.
Citizen Vigilante — previously titled The Dark Knight — stars once-promising actor Armie Hammer (The Social Network, Call Me By Your Name) as Sanders, a man who “takes justice into his own hands,” according to the film’s official website. Sanders’ vigilante crusade, mostly targeting a wave of criminal migrants, makes him a social media star but puts him at odds with a local police chief played by Costas Mandylor of Saw franchise fame. Boll’s hyper-violent film is based on real events, its creators say, and critics have blasted it as “morally bankrupt,” “borderline snuff,” and “cheap, incoherent and embarrassingly badly acted.”
Still, it’s been a hit with a certain noxious online audience. It’s been on Prime Video’s top 10 purchases and rentals this week, in part thanks to a promotional boost from insufferable tech dork Elon Musk, who — with Boll’s permission — made Citizen Vigilante free to watch on X for two days. That has apparently endeared it to a subset of cinephiles who can still stomach their X feed: Citizen Vigilante boasts a 93% Popcornmeter audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a stark contrast to the 6% Tomatometer score from critics.
Boll’s never been a critical darling, largely due to the quality of the work he releases and his attacks on critics. Back in 2006, he physically fought some of them. Boll allegedly retired from filmmaking in 2016, a pledge that didn’t hold. In 2022, he released Hanau, a movie described as “a psychological profile of the first QAnon mass murderer,” and he’s been back churning out his brand of cinema since.
But Boll finally has something for people who play games, not just watch them be lazily adapted. On Monday, the director, who received the Razzie Awards’ Worst Career Achievement dishonor in 2009 for his impressively consistent output of dreck, announced that a video game adaptation of Citizen Vigilante is coming to PlayStation 5 this month. Developed by Daniel Wengenroth, who runs German game studio Polygon Art (no relation to Polygon.com), the official Citizen Vigilante video game promises a similarly violent and gory revenge tale.
“When the system fails, justice becomes personal,” reads the game’s PlayStation Store description. “A city consumed by crime. A system pushed to its limits. People are losing faith. You are Sanders — not a hero, not a savior, but a man who decided to act. Take justice into your own hands, hunt down criminals, uncover corruption, and face the consequences of your actions. Some will call you a hero. Others will call you a threat.”
Citizen Vigilante promises “brutal, fast-paced action combat” and “gritty, violent gameplay with gore and dismemberment.”
Take a look, y’all.
Polygon Art’s output thus far, like Boll’s, is prolific. The studio has developed or published at least 14 titles over the past seven years, mostly military shooters and job simulation games on Steam.
News of the Citizen Vigilante game arrives just as the film’s star is reportedly regretting taking part in the project. In a story on Puck, an unnamed source in Armie Hammer’s camp said the actor was “in tears” after seeing the film for the first time. Said a source, “He called me and said, ‘Fuck. This is hateful, disgusting.’”
We’ll report back on how well Citizen Vigilante, the video game, has turned out when it arrives on PlayStation 5 on July 17.