Elon Musk opted to stream Armie Hammer’s German-banned film “Citizen Vigilante” on X for 48 hours one week after the movie debuted on streamers and in theaters. Musk posted the film on Thursday.
The movie was also shared by director Uwe Boll on the social media platform.
“Here it is. It’s Uwe Boll, director from Citizen Vigilante. The hour’s up, the movie’s now available on X for 48 hours. Enjoy,” Musk said in a video shared on the platform.
In the film, Hammer plays an American businessman who goes after rapists, violent criminals, and judges before becoming a wanted man himself.
The movie has been banned in Germany due to extreme violence and a perceived anti-immigrant message, an allegation its director denied.
“The rating system refused to give us a rating [in Germany], so now you can only watch it if you bring in a Blu-ray from Austria or Switzerland,” Boll told The Telegraph. “And I think they did that on purpose. It was a deliberate censorship decision. 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.”
The movie was inspired by a 2016 case in Hamburg when a group of teens raped a 14-year-old girl and left her for dead.
“If you look at what happened in Hamburg, where the rapists walked free without any penalty, the coverage in the media was like ‘Oh, the poor perpetrators,’” Boll told the outlet of the case. “It’s as if we’re living in a completely insane and absurd political environment, especially in Europe, where people have completely lost track. There is a huge difference between so-called ‘hate speech’ and stabbing people in the neck. But facts don’t matter anymore.”
The film marks a major step back into the industry for Hammer, whose career took an abrupt downturn when a number of women came forward in 2021 with allegations against him involving rape, sexual and emotional abuse.
Hammer denied all the allegations against him, insisting that he had only ever engaged in acts of consensual BDSM and emotional abuse. No criminal charges were ever filed after an LAPD investigation into the allegations.
That did not stop Hammer from being dropped from a number of projects, though, and becoming something of a post-#MeToo Hollywood pariah. Since the allegations came out, he has starred in just one film that was shot after 2021, last year’s “Frontier Crucible.”
