‘Citizen Vigilante’ director: Netflix too politically correct to make the movie

German filmmaker Uwe Boll says his new revenge thriller “Citizen Vigilante” exists because streaming giants such as Netflix refuse to depict migrant crime honestly on screen, opting instead for sanitized portrayals out of fear of backlash.

In an interview with Double Toasted, Mr. Boll said a studio like Netflix would reject a script depicting a migrant character as a murderer simply to avoid appearing politically incorrect. “This movie is kind of a revolt against it,” he said, arguing there needs to be room for brutal, one-sided films that don’t flinch from the subject.

Mr. Boll made a similar complaint about German cinema, arguing that films there tend to portray migrant characters as uniformly well-integrated and sympathetic, a depiction he called divorced from reality.

“Citizen Vigilante” stars Armie Hammer as Sanders, a vigilante who hunts down criminals — most of them migrants — after the legal system fails to punish them. Mr. Boll has said the film draws on a 2016 Hamburg case in which a group of teenagers gang-raped a 14-year-old girl and received only suspended sentences.

Mr. Boll compared his approach to filmmakers who used shocking material to provoke audiences, pointing to Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” as precedent for building a story around an unsympathetic lead. He said making Sanders cold and difficult to root for was a deliberate choice meant to keep the audience at a distance rather than inviting them to admire the character.

He also described resisting Mr. Hammer’s request to cut a scene in which Sanders drives an innocent motorist off the road, saying the moment illustrates that the character cares more about his cause than about who gets hurt along the way.

The comments follow weeks of controversy surrounding the film. It was denied an age rating in Germany after regulators there concluded it could incite violence against migrants, a decision Mr. Boll has likened to censorship. Asked directly if he was a Nazi, he laughed and said, “I am not a Nazi!” Tech billionaire Elon Musk later streamed the movie in full on X for 48 hours, boosting its profile among right-leaning audiences.

Mr. Boll has also pushed back on a Puck report claiming Mr. Hammer was privately distressed after seeing the finished film. Mr. Boll told TheWrap that “we both had a great time working together” and pointed to the film’s strong audience scores as vindication. During a combative Reddit AMA promoting the film, Mr. Boll brushed off critics, telling them to judge the movie by its reception with audiences rather than reviewers.

“Citizen Vigilante” has drawn a 6% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes but a 93% score from audiences, according to the outlet.