Aahana Swrup
‘Citizen Vigilante’ is an action-packed film in which one normal man, with a hefty bank account, decides to overcome his exhaustion with the system by taking justice into his own hands. Sanders lives a life of mystery, juggling different investments and businesses. After he watches one too many criminals, responsible for everything from theft and corruption to rape, walk free as a result of a convoluted and controlling system, he resorts to an extreme measure. The ex-military man begins to hunt down the criminals in his city, delivering them to his own brand of justice. As a result, news of his actions, credited to the anonymous doings of a killer dubbed as “citizen vigilante,’ spread across the world like wildfire. However, this also means more trouble is awaiting him around the corner as Interport Chief Henry begins a hunt of his own with the vigilante as his target. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Citizen Vigilante Plot Synopsis
Social media and traditional news channels have both been taken by storm as a result of the cryptic happenings in a nondescript European city. Recently, a punisher of sorts seems to have emerged from the public, taking justice into his own hands. This anonymous person, known as a citizen vigilante, is deemed to be a hero by some spheres of the public, while the authorities have labeled him a criminal. He operates entirely outside of the law, killing abusers and criminals who have escaped a fair trial and judgment under a corruptible justice system. Naturally, this also makes him a criminal, responsible for unlawful killings and executions. Thus, Interpol Regional Chief Henry is assigned to identify and apprehend the mysterious justice-seeker. Meanwhile, the vigilante, whose real name is Sanders, pays a visit to a woman in the hospital who was recently a victim of a brutal rape.
Sanders asks the woman how she would like justice to be delivered to her abusers. Initially, she claims to want them jailed for life. However, once he explains how seeking resolution through legal channels would be expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally exhausting without the guarantee of resolution, she changes her mind. Thus, Sanders finds himself setting his sights on the abusers, who, as it turns out, frequent a bar that he owns. The two friends have a long history of roofying drinks and carrying out their wild assaults. Thus, he gives them a taste of their own medicines, switching out their drinks and drugging them to make their abduction easier. However, unbeknownst to him, Agent Henry also happens to be at the same bar, following a lead.
As a result, when Henry notices Sanders’ interaction with the suspicious men, he connects the dots and steals some of his DNA from the scene. Consequently, the next day, he’s able to carry out a raid on the vigilante’s house with a SWAT team. Nonetheless, the destination turns out to be a trap and a fortress where Sanders is waiting in a protective vault and has enough artillery to give Henry’s troops a run for their money. As such, the mission proves to be a failure with a massive body count and an escaped vigilante. Afterward, Sanders goes on another self-righteous mission, this time regarding a widely covered case in which a young girl was gang raped by a group of boys.
When the case had gone to trial, the judge had pardoned the abusers, many of whom were Muslim migrants. The optics of the case had compelled much of the backlash to circle around devising anti-migrant rhetoric. Once Sanders gains a satisfying green light from the victim, he goes after the people responsible for the injustice. He starts with the Judge who ruled on the case and kills him via a staged suicide. Afterward, he pays a visit to Yusuf, one of the boys who was part of the gang rape. He holds his entire family hostage at gunpoint, blaming his parents for the boy’s upbringing as well as his sister, who had slutshamed the victim days before on social media. In the end, Sanders uses Yusuf to call the other boys to his house before slaughtering everyone inside.
Citizen Vigilante Ending: Why Does Sanders Become a Vigilante?
Throughout the film, we follow Sanders on his vengeance-filled crusade, interspliced with a long-running montage that seems to be an unofficial manifesto of his campaign. The man, equipped with military-level training and no shortage of fiscal resources, has a very clear MO. He goes after violent criminals, robbers, murderers, rapists, and more, who have been allowed to walk unpunished by a cold and uncaring system. His missions of revenge are preceded by visits to the victims, in what seems to be some sort of attempt at getting their consent before hunting down their abusers. However, it’s hard to tell what exactly drives Sanders to such extreme measures. Similarly, his out-of-place presence at an unnamed European city, despite the inconvenient fact of his American citizenship, also remains confounding.
The narrative provides a few puzzle pieces to clue the audience in on the background of the vigilante. The most foundational aspect of his past seems to stem from the fact that he had a distant and unloving father who sent him off to boarding school when he was young. Afterward, he chose to join the military himself and received the news of his father’s passing in the barracks. This is what compelled him to make his way to Europe, where he eventually ended up taking an extended vacation. Thus, it seems Sanders’ cold disposition is a result of an unhappy childhood. Furthermore, his early inclination toward the military, without any material need for it, suggests that he has always had a taste for justice achieved through violence. This context highly influences the nature of his acts of vigilance.
In his manifesto, Sanders claims that his actions are a result of a rampantly corrupt system that seeks to control more than it wants to deliver justice. Therefore, he has taken matters into his own hands. He’s fighting for the abused in hopes that the people of the world will wake and decide to fight for themselves. Yet, his moral code seems flimsy if not entirely non-existent at times. He speaks about killing in the name of justice, but also ruthlessly hurts teenagers as a punishment for bullying. He talks about victims of the system while being a prominent benefactor of it as both a landlord and a brothel-owner by profession. In truth, Sanders is a being of violence. The only injustices he recognizes are those caused by violence, and the only vengeance he can fathom lies in the same violence. Thus, his entire identity becomes confined within his own twisted sense of justice.
Does Sanders Get Caught?
Even though the film pitches the chase between Sanders and Henry as a foundational element of the story, no firm resolution arrives on the matter. It becomes apparent early on that the vigilants’ skills of aversion are better than even the Interpol agent’s suspiciously accurate guesswork. Henry’s instincts bring him to Sanders’ bar and compel him to view the owner as a suspect. Nonetheless, all of it turns out to be for naught since the vigilante will always be ten steps ahead. Moreover, thanks to his generational wealth, he will always be better equipped to handle even the worst of what the authorities have to throw at him.
Additionally, it also helps that Sanders and his crusade for so-called justice have earned him a prominent following worldwide. People on social media consistently sing his praises and clamor for more people like him to spring up in their own countries. Needless to say, he has the public’s support. Therefore, when he sends a message to Henry insisting that he share it with the news, the agent has little choice in the matter. The film ends with Sanders’ message in which his face and his voice remain obscured. Yet, the fact remains that Henry already knows of his identity thanks to the DNA test. It seems, for now, the vigilante is out in the world. Still, his methods are hardly sustainable and may eventually lead to his downfall.
Why Did Sanders Kill Yusuf’s Family?
By the end, Sanders’ moral code gets fleshed out enough that the audience can assume he only kills the guilty in his execution. Therefore, the ending of the story, in which he slaughters Yusuf, his friends, and his family, comes as a surprise. Within the established morality of the vigilante, Yusuf and his friends’ deaths aren’t anything out of the ordinary. They’re convicted perpetrators of a violent gang rape, and it was only the flaws of the system that have kept them out of prison. However, the same charges were never levied on the young man’s family. Instead, Sanders’ execution of them stems entirely from an ideological standpoint. He believes the father to be guilty for failing to imbue the wrong morals in his son. In fact, he believes that the father, and specifically his Islamic faith, had intentionally taught Yusuf the ways of such violence. Thus, his mother becomes guilty of the same crime.
On the other hand, his sister is held to the same amount of guilt for the social media posts she shared, insisting that the victim deserved her fate due to her immodesty. However, this is the only instance in which Sanders is seen going after people for their beliefs and ideologies. He doesn’t have a strict moral imperative towards punishing misogyny; otherwise, he wouldn’t own a brothel. Or at least, stake out his own establishment’s clientele for new potential targets. Likewise, he doesn’t deem parenting a rapist to be punishable by death in any other instance; otherwise, news of mass murder would accompany each of his executions. In fact, the parents of Yusuf’s rapist friends would also instantly find a spot on his hit list, but they never do. Therefore, this final act of violence solidifies the inevitable: Sanders’ violence is mindless, devoid of logic or compassion, and ultimately morally bankrupt.
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