I used to love that old 1974 movie, Death Wish. It’s the one with Charles Bronson taking the law into his own hands to avenge the gang-rape of his daughter by a band of criminal thugs because the real policemen in town were too feckless and uncaring to do it for him.
Addicted as Hollywood is to endless remakes, reboots and reimaginings, some enterprising producer should have the nous to make a new 2026 version. A straight remake did appear in 2018, starring Bruce Willis, but it was bland and uninspired. Far better would be for the movie to be entirely reimagined with its themes adapted to address the more pressing contemporary issues and concerns of today.
Actually, somebody has just done precisely that, but plenty of people won’t be able to see it. The movie in question was removed from distribution in certain European markets this month. And it’s all because in this 2026 version, the gang-rapists being picked off one by one by an enraged amateur gunman are all illegal immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.
The new revenge flick is called Citizen Vigilante. It stars disgraced ex-Hollywood actor Armie Hammer (which may be why its story is part-cannibalised). He plays a killer hunting down rapists ‘of a migration background’ living in Europe, and punishing them in a way the feeble liberal state will not. German director Uwe Boll says the story, far from being the product of his own wild, racist imagination, is based on a real-life case from Hamburg in 2020, in which nine foreign-born youths were convicted of raping a 15-year-old German girl in a park, but only one got any actual time behind bars. Instead, a girl who called one of the rapists a ‘pig’ online got a harsher sentence than he did.
As several rapists were minors, their sentences were suspended, with German judges, criminologists and media speaking sympathetically of what Boll sarcastically called the ‘poor’ traumatised perpetrators. Outraged by the leniency, Boll appears to have sat back and imagined how very good it might make him feel to take matters into his own hands – and so, six years later, we have his new Citizen Vigilante film.
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If you live in the US or Canada, you can see the movie right now. But if you live in Germany, the authorities want to make it much harder for you to do so. The German film-rating body, FSK, has refused point-blank to give it an age-rating certificate, making its release illegal. This decision has been spuriously justified, precisely like Labour’s Online Safety Act in the UK, in terms of supposedly ‘protecting children’ from exposure to footage of extreme acts. If German teens want to see that kind of thing happening, they’ll just have to visit a Hamburg park to experience it all live in person for themselves.
Or so it initially appeared. It’s now emerged that Elon Musk got wind of the story, and then purchased temporary rights to stream the movie in its entirety on his X account, which has 200million followers worldwide. This has allowed far more Germans to watch it for free than ever would have viewed it had the FSK not oppressively intervened in the first place. An excellent lesson, there, in why censorship so often fails.
According to Boll, the real reason for the FSK ban is that the German government wants to suppress ‘the reality that mass migration from predominantly Islamic countries has severely damaged the security situation in Germany… Thus, with this decision, the FSK may not be [acting] in the service of the “protection of minors”, but in the service of preserving the current government and its status quo, giving up freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of art.’
Besides shooting foreign rapists, Hammer’s vigilante also murders the politicians he holds responsible for allowing them in, in the first place. Worse, in the trailer, he urges people to ‘Take back control’ – so he must even be a Brexiteer. The general excuse for banning it seems to be that the movie will generate a so-called Clockwork Orange effect by so enthusing audiences they go out and fire bullets at a passing Afghan themselves. Never mind that vanishingly few people want to see such real-life, non-celluloid violence pursued against completely innocent people. Evidently, the German censors are unaware of Aristotle’s ancient Greek concept of catharsis, whereby the expression of emotions on stage, or today on screen, helps exorcise and purge negative passions and drives among audiences, rather than baiting them to copy what they see.
The pattern of censorship is similar elsewhere in Europe. Rather than allowing concerned citizens to express their legitimate fears and emotions about uncontrolled mass migration, censor-happy elites force them to bottle it all up. French anti-immigration influencer Thaïs d’Escufon, who was allegedly herself sexually assaulted in her own home by a Tunisian man in 2021, is currently facing charges of ‘inciting racial hatred’ and potential jail time for saying during a 2023 TV interview that, ‘The main danger for women [in France today] is immigrant men, Africans, blacks, and Arabs’. Whether you agree or not, or are offended or not, in a free society, people should surely still be able to say such things without the threat of imprisonment.
Not that Europe’s political class seems to understand this. In response to the white Scottish man who went on a rampage in Edinburgh earlier this month, stabbing at random innocent Muslims, former first minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf jumped towards the supposedly ‘obvious’ explanation. He claimed the suspect had clearly been reading Rupert Lowe’s new Rape-Gang Inquiry report. Lowe may have thought he was blowing the whistle on the mainly Pakistani rape gangs, but Yousaf felt he was actually blowing a ‘dog whistle’ to racists, urging them to commit violence.
So what’s the solution, then, Humza? Start banning inconvenient books and reports, as well as banning films and imprisoning alleged assault victims? What do you suppose the likely end result will be?
The whole Citizen Vigilante censorship saga certainly makes for a great story – one that’s absolutely laden with lashings and lashings of pure dramatic irony. Someone should turn it all into a movie. They could call it Civilisational Death Wish.
Steven Tucker is a writer whose work is published frequently in outlets in the US and UK. His latest book is Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science.