Since talk about this film has been doing the rounds and it is controversial enough to have been banned in Germany, I decided to track it down. For what could possibly be so 'bad', so 'racist', about a film directed by someone with no known Rightist sympathies, whose lead actor identifies as 'half-Jewish', has been accused of rape, has experimented with homosexual acts via Grindr hookups, and who has been accused of having cannibalistic desires by multiple women? Isn't this just like the film version of Kanye West's 'Heil Hitler' song? A novelty that will be forgotten as fast as it emerged?
What to expect regarding themes:
You do *not* want children anywhere near this. Nor anyone faint-hearted or with a weak stomach. Nevertheless, there are no themes in it that haven't been outdone by other films. Thus, I conclude that Germany's refusal to apply a classification to the film - which effectively bans it - is purely because of its supposed 'potential' to incite violence against immigrants, and not because of any of the below themes.
When we discard this kind of paranoia about its criminogenic potential and look at the movie calmly and rationally, what do I personally think that its classification should be? For whom is this movie safe? Why would I say that this film clearly deserves an R/NC/Adults Only/equivalent film classification rather than a refusal to classify, i.e. a ban in all but name?
Medium-to-Strong Sexual Themes/Nudity: There is a lengthy sex scene involving a prostitute. Said scene also adds nothing to the plot. A flashback of a rape (by nons) later occurs, but, unlike the former scene, this scene is not explicit.
Medium-Level Coarse Language: Throughout the whole film.
Mild Drug Use (no recreational drug use): Two White males try to spike two White women's drinks with an unspecified liquid date rape drug with the intent of taking them to a hotel to rape them. A White male Leftist or liberal judge is injected with an unspecified, similar drug, the protagonist later remarks to the incapacitated judge that it probably feels like heroin. Alcohol consumption occurs at various points, and alcohol is also spilled over the judge as the protagonist tries to pass off his murder of the judge as a guilt-induced suicide.
Strong Violence: Like other Boll films, this uses violence against civilians to be controversial, shocking, and transgressive. For instance, a White woman is fatally stabbed in the neck by a negroid in the first few minutes. (This is the kind of scene that would horrify Western governments.) Violence against the pigs is another commonality with other Boll films. SWAT comes after the protagonist. At least one pig's head explodes in the ensuing shoot-out. The blood and gore effects are generally graphic and won't disappoint those who enjoy such content.
Overall verdict: This film is something of a novelty and will probably attract a cult following. Otherwise, it is par for the course. One has the sneaking suspicion that if the races were reversed: a non-white tough guy killing White rapists and cops, this movie would be hailed as progressive and certainly not subject to any bans. Thus, one could think of it as a typical action film wearing an unusual skin; it inverts our usual expectations: a cold, emotionless American tough guy is the protagonist while the antagonists are violent criminal nons, along with SWAT and Leftist judges.
Is there any genuinely 'racist' content at all? The answer is flatly no: no mention is even made of race, no racial slurs appear in the dialogue, etc. Leftists are simply getting het up because Boll wasn't afraid to depict nons as murderers and rapists, even though they were in the specific rape incident that the rape incident in the film is based on. 'Islamic extremists and the woke Left' is probably the closest dialogue to anything 'racist', but, ultimately, that's just civic nationalist language at most.
A brief aside: This film was shot entirely in Croatia and has many Croatian names in the credits. However, the film's world is not any specific country. It is only clear that it occurs somewhere in Europe. Whether intended or not, this makes sense because these problems are now everywhere in Europe, after all. The fact that it could be anywhere at all in Europe strengthens its case: to Europeans, the film is no longer about 'just some other country', but your own.
One wonders if Boll had great trouble trying to find a country that would permit him to shoot scenes for this film, leading him to approach more obscure countries. He certainly would not have been able to shoot this in Germany.
What to expect regarding themes:
You do *not* want children anywhere near this. Nor anyone faint-hearted or with a weak stomach. Nevertheless, there are no themes in it that haven't been outdone by other films. Thus, I conclude that Germany's refusal to apply a classification to the film - which effectively bans it - is purely because of its supposed 'potential' to incite violence against immigrants, and not because of any of the below themes.
When we discard this kind of paranoia about its criminogenic potential and look at the movie calmly and rationally, what do I personally think that its classification should be? For whom is this movie safe? Why would I say that this film clearly deserves an R/NC/Adults Only/equivalent film classification rather than a refusal to classify, i.e. a ban in all but name?
Medium-to-Strong Sexual Themes/Nudity: There is a lengthy sex scene involving a prostitute. Said scene also adds nothing to the plot. A flashback of a rape (by nons) later occurs, but, unlike the former scene, this scene is not explicit.
Medium-Level Coarse Language: Throughout the whole film.
Mild Drug Use (no recreational drug use): Two White males try to spike two White women's drinks with an unspecified liquid date rape drug with the intent of taking them to a hotel to rape them. A White male Leftist or liberal judge is injected with an unspecified, similar drug, the protagonist later remarks to the incapacitated judge that it probably feels like heroin. Alcohol consumption occurs at various points, and alcohol is also spilled over the judge as the protagonist tries to pass off his murder of the judge as a guilt-induced suicide.
Strong Violence: Like other Boll films, this uses violence against civilians to be controversial, shocking, and transgressive. For instance, a White woman is fatally stabbed in the neck by a negroid in the first few minutes. (This is the kind of scene that would horrify Western governments.) Violence against the pigs is another commonality with other Boll films. SWAT comes after the protagonist. At least one pig's head explodes in the ensuing shoot-out. The blood and gore effects are generally graphic and won't disappoint those who enjoy such content.
Overall verdict: This film is something of a novelty and will probably attract a cult following. Otherwise, it is par for the course. One has the sneaking suspicion that if the races were reversed: a non-white tough guy killing White rapists and cops, this movie would be hailed as progressive and certainly not subject to any bans. Thus, one could think of it as a typical action film wearing an unusual skin; it inverts our usual expectations: a cold, emotionless American tough guy is the protagonist while the antagonists are violent criminal nons, along with SWAT and Leftist judges.
Is there any genuinely 'racist' content at all? The answer is flatly no: no mention is even made of race, no racial slurs appear in the dialogue, etc. Leftists are simply getting het up because Boll wasn't afraid to depict nons as murderers and rapists, even though they were in the specific rape incident that the rape incident in the film is based on. 'Islamic extremists and the woke Left' is probably the closest dialogue to anything 'racist', but, ultimately, that's just civic nationalist language at most.
A brief aside: This film was shot entirely in Croatia and has many Croatian names in the credits. However, the film's world is not any specific country. It is only clear that it occurs somewhere in Europe. Whether intended or not, this makes sense because these problems are now everywhere in Europe, after all. The fact that it could be anywhere at all in Europe strengthens its case: to Europeans, the film is no longer about 'just some other country', but your own.
One wonders if Boll had great trouble trying to find a country that would permit him to shoot scenes for this film, leading him to approach more obscure countries. He certainly would not have been able to shoot this in Germany.
'Government bad' is a common Boll motif, e.g. in *Rampage.* That relates to, and explains, the observation made elsewhere in the comments: 'the protagonist actually kills more cops than rapefugees'.
> [scene everyone has watched] totally failing to make the case that rape is cultural
That scene is essentially anti-religious (the protagonist condemns the family for their 'commitment to religion, over democracy, and over anything else, including the rule of law') and 'Islamophobic' (shortly after the father says 'I teach him the values from Qu'ran and these values from our family' [words which explicitly identify the family as Muslim], the protagonist uses the words 'archaic value system'), and indeed non-'racist'. The viewer is thus thinking: This has nothing to do with biology, it is purely religious and sociocultural. But, yes, that is obviously undermined by the fact that two of Yusuf's co-rapist friends are visibly African. Were they, too, simply victims of a paramount 'commitment to religion... over anything else', of an 'archaic value system'? Why would they have families whose values just happen to be the same as Yusuf's family's values? Although some of them are given Arabic-style names when a coerced Yusuf starts calling them to lure them to their house so that they too can be killed, the credits list six characters as Yusuf's friends. Thus, some of them aren't even named. What, and all six just happen to have the same religion *and* family values as Yusuf's family? At the end of the day, the biology shared by these nons is the most plausible commonality that Yusuf and his friends have. We don't need to know their names or families to know that they're all of low-IQ, low impulse control races. We only need to see their faces, and we do.
> Chronology
I also consciously felt thrown off by the order of events: the film seems to sporadically switch from later to earlier events and back again in a way that will probably throw off every viewer very quickly. Some scenes (e.g. at 20:00, 52:25) in which he speaks directly to the camera seemed like they were answers to questioning, probably police questioning, which made me wonder whether he would be captured by the film's end and is trying to talk his way out of it all, which would make those scenes chronologically very late. Yet it seems, in hindsight, like he might have been brought into police questioning much earlier, was then released, and only then did the police realize that it was him, that they already had the right guy, all along, hence SWAT having to go and get him again. This then puts these scenes chronologically before the SWAT shoot-out, even though the SWAT shoot-out occurs *in between* the two aforementioned timestamps.
> It's just "all the judges adopted Woke values for no reason" and that's the problem.
Indeed. At 1:05:26, he tells the judge: 'You are the cancer that is killing [society].' Thus, the buck stops with the likes of Leftist or liberal judges or thereabouts. Such an analysis is totally superficial, just scratching the surface of the deep multi-layeredness of the problem. Did these judges simply come out of a vacuum? In other words, the protagonist is practically clueless as to how such people are the product of deeply embedded ideologies and social structures that long predate the film's events.
Elsewhere, you had questions about the White mother fatally stabbed at the beginning. Initially, I thought that she might tie in later as having been his wife, hence giving him a personal motive for vigilantism, but no such thing happened, and her son exits the film at that point as well. The only purpose for introducing this character seems to have been to set her up for a quick death for an early shock-inducing effect. The intended effect on the audience is like: 'Wow, this is so bloody and jarring and shocking and violent, this is so characteristically Uwe Boll!' She has no known relation to the protagonist at all.
Another oddity upon which I will conclude is that, upon his second encounter with the young bullies/thugs around 59:00, the White girl seemed to vanish altogether. I assumed that she ran away, but you don't actually see that. My feeling is that Boll didn't want a female to be punished the same way as the two male nons, and so he quickly needed her out of the scene, but removing her was done so poorly that it looks like she just vanishes into thin air altogether. Rewatching it, perhaps it is her shoe on the bottom-right at 59:32, suggesting she never fled, remained silent, and was left unpunished. But, assuming that she is still standing there as the two male nons receive their punishments, just where is she later on as the camera is in bird's eye view at 1:00:34? Thus, now I think she ran away immediately, again. But just whose shoe was it at 59:32, then? That of somebody who isn't meant to be in the film at all?
It is also noticeable that, in this scene, he says to the bullying victim: 'I will give you their names'. I assumed that he would obtain their names coercively, but he does no such thing. This fits nicely into your observation, which is, essentially, that the protagonist often seems to be omniscient: he either somehow already knew the bullies' names, or could simply find them out later on, such that he doesn't even use the moment as opportunity to get their names from them then and there at all. It is also interesting that contents of his bag are spilled by the bullies and largely seem to vanish immediately, as if they were blown away in an instant.
Reflecting on all this, I can only conclude that the film lacks polish and has too many, to borrow a gaming term, 'bugs' or 'glitches' in it, that needed to be ironed out before release. That was just from my watching plus rewatching of one scene, which yields three 'bugs': the shoe at 59:32, the White girl not clearly being removed from the scene and thus seemingly vanishing, and the backpack's contents largely vanishing.