In what international news scientists are already calling a confluence of three of the worst dudes to ever do it, Armie Hammer, Elon Musk, and director Uwe Boll entered into a brief collaboration this weekend, forcing untold numbers of generally blameless human beings to read all three of their names within the span of a single sentence. In a further escalation against the forces of good taste, the trio also forced people with eyeballs to take in a carefully crafted triptych of their faces; truly, an offensive on all fronts.
It shakes out like this: Boll and Hammer have been working together for a minute now, having teamed up for Boll’s latest clumsily crafted provocation, Citizen Vigilante. Said film sees Hammer—who hasn’t appeared in a Hollywood movie since 2022’s Death On The Nile, after being accused of abusive behaviors toward women in 2021—play a man who goes on a violent vigilante spree against migrants who have committed the most pulled-from-the-right-wing-tabloids kinds of crimes across Europe. (He also yells at people for not paying their bus fare.) According to Boll, the movie was recently given an “unrated” rating by Germany’s self-regulating movie rating board, the FSK, making it unlikely it would be shown in German theaters—and if the confluence of supposed censorship and “paints migrants as uniformly violent criminals” has your Elon senses tingling, congratulations: Your grasp of the rhythms of the 2026 news cycle is currently operating at a graduate level.
Apparently fed up by the censors, Boll posted Citizen Vigilante on Twitter this weekend for a span of 48 hours, aimed at his whopping 19,400 followers. At which point, Musk decided to step in and personally promote the film to the 240 million people who follow him, to say nothing of all the non-follower folks that the X algorithm regularly serves his “content.” Musk, as far as we know, has no investment in the movie—outside of the way it rhymes with the virulent anti-immigration campaigns he’s been waging for months and years at this point, leastways—but serving it up to a population more than half the size of the entire United States has to be viewed as some slight measure of endorsement. It’s not clear how many people actually watched the film, which Boll has now pulled back down, courtesy of Musk’s lift, but 313,000 have liked the post promoting it. (Among other things, the film now sports more than a thousand glowingly positive ratings on the audience side of Rotten Tomatoes, many of them posted in the last hour; meanwhile, it sports all of four write-ups from professional critics, all negative.) All of which is to say that Musk may finally have helped Boll find his dream audience: A bunch of people who will slather his movies with praise not for their questionable craft or content, but for punching down at exactly the right folks.
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