At the beginning of Citizen Vigilante, a new film that has reached #1 on Amazon Prime, something shocking happens. A young white woman walking down the street of a European city is suddenly stabbed in the neck by an African migrant.
The surprise that moment delivers marks Citizen Vigilante as the latest entrant in a genre I’ll call basedsploitation. A non-exhaustive list of basedsploitation films would include Bone Tomahawk (2015), Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017), Dragged Across Concrete (2018), Run. Hide. Fight. (2020), Sound of Freedom (2023), Nefarious (2023), and Muzzle (2023). Run. Hide. Fight. Infidels, a sequel to Run. Hide. Fight. coming this fall, will almost certainly make the list.
“These films raise a middle finger to the liberal establishment.”
Six of the nine films listed above share the same producer, Dallas Sonnier, more or less the only executive in today’s world known for bringing right-wing stories to the big screen. The first three have the same director, S. Craig Zahler, an auteur with a background in heavy metal. Many also feature disgraced stars whose bad behavior or conservative beliefs got them ostracized from Hollywood: Mel Gibson in Dragged, Armie Hammer in Citizen, Jonathan Majors in Infidels, Jim Caviezel in Sound of Freedom. This makes sense, because all these films raise a middle finger to the liberal establishment.