Entertainment
Uwe Boll's Extremely R-Rated Film Is The Most Dangerous Satire Ever Made
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Most great satire is misunderstood at first because, more often than not, its subjects buy into it without the slightest hint of irony. I don’t have enough fingers on my hands to count how many people I grew up with posting Tyler Durden or Patrick Bateman quotes on their MySpace profiles to sound edgy and cool, not realizing these men aren’t supposed to be in on the joke; they are the joke. Similarly, Starship Troopers’ satire took a minute to catch up with the masses because the whole thing is supposed to be a scathing indictment of tyrannical governments, nationalism, imperialism, and military might.
I have friends who wanted to, and did, join the Army because they thought Starship Troopers was so cool. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of good satire is that it can be dangerous; the very behavior it’s holding under a magnifying glass to ridicule is often celebrated by people who refuse to read into the subtext.
Which brings us to Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante. It’s banned in parts of Europe, but can now be purchased on-demand in the United States, and it’s an interesting film to say the least. After watching it this past Friday, and thinking about it over the weekend, I can say with 1,000 percent confidence that the film is, without a doubt, a straight-faced satire.
The question that I’ve been asking myself, though, is whether it’s a good satire, or even an effective one, which is no easy question to answer. On one hand, if you read between the lines, everything about this movie is so over-the-top and hyperbolic that I’d be hard-pressed to find any movie lover who wouldn’t pick up on what it was trying to accomplish.
But we also need to consider that most casual viewers won’t be looking at Citizen Vigilante this closely, taking everything it says at face value, meaning that its messaging, as read off the page, is quite dangerous.
Uwe Boll, in my opinion, made a brilliant satire with 2007’s Postal, though I’m sure a lot of you will disagree with me here. Every single character is hateful and loathsome, acting in equally hateful and loathsome ways, and the comedy comes from thinking to yourself, “these jerks are acting like jerks, and then terrible things happen to them because of how they acted.” It’s juvenile, edgy in that eighth-grade gamer kind of way, and offends all sensibilities, but it gives its viewers an out. People can appreciate the satire, and move on without it rocking their world beyond its initial shock value.
Citizen Vigilante, on the other hand, is so deadly serious in its delivery that I could see why and how certain people who have certain extreme beliefs may celebrate everything the movie is trying to dismantle, which is inherently dangerous if left unchecked.
Why Is Citizen Vigilante A Satire?
Citizen Vigilante centers on Armie Hammer’s Michael Sanders, a U.S. citizen living in Europe who takes the law into his own hands without ever experiencing a sliver of doubt that he’s doing the right thing. His primary target is immigrants living in Europe illegally, who, in his mind and many others, are the cause of all of the continent’s violent crimes. Until migration policies are treated more seriously by the powers that be, Michael Sanders makes it known that he will continue to roam the streets, using extreme violence to take the law into his own hands to solve the “problem” once and for all.
Searching for the Citizen Vigilante’s true identity so he can apprehend him is Interpol Regional Chief Henry (Costas Mandylor). It’s worth noting that Henry would like to see reformation on the immigration front, but he’d prefer to do everything by the books. Henry is a man of nuance who recognizes there’s a crime problem, but also understands that better vetting processes can coexist with people legitimately seeking a better life through legal immigration.
Though there are some violent, epic showdowns between these two heavy hitters, here’s why Citizen Vigilante is most certainly a satire: Michael is a violent immigrant.
He’s a U.S. citizen who inherited his late father’s real estate business. When he makes his rounds to inspect his properties, he’s mostly concerned with their value and structural integrity so he can keep making money off of them. When his business partner, Owen (Steffen Mennekes), brings up his citizenship issues, and how some of his properties stand to be seized to be transformed into migrant housing because of them, Sanders refuses to budge, even if it’s exactly what the surrounding communities need to handle their immigration issues in a more peaceful way.
In other words, Sanders is not a European citizen, and he’s benefiting greatly from Europe’s resources without consequence up to this point.
To make matters worse, some, probably several, of these properties are brothels. If Sanders’ entire goal is to protect women from being assaulted in the streets, which makes them feel unsafe when walking alone, then he lacks any semblance of self-awareness by not realizing that he’s part of the problem. Sure, money changes hands between consenting adults at these brothels, at least from what we’re shown. I have a hard time believing there’s no human trafficking or abuse happening behind closed doors, which makes Michael Sanders complicit in the same kind of societal degradation that he’s profiting from while allegedly fighting against it.
Need More Clues?
Michael Sanders has several workout montages in Citizen Vigilante. Michael Sanders speaks almost entirely in extremist clichés in Citizen Vigilante. Michael Sanders looks at all of the social media posts that praise his “heroic” actions in landscape mode, even though they were clearly filmed and optimized for vertical formats. The dude thinks he’s a chad, but he’s really just a chode.
Michael Sanders communicates through violence, traumatizing God knows how many people in the process, for the sake of what he considers to be justice. Meanwhile, Henry, who will stop at nothing to stop our protagonist from taking the law into his own hands, is the film’s representation of regular people who recognize that most societal issues are systemic, complex, and require biblical amounts of cooperation from all parties to leave the world a better place than it currently is.
The guy you’ve always been supposed to root for in Citizen Vigilante is Henry. The story is told through Michael Sanders’ perspective not because he’s the hero, but because it’s the behavior that Boll wants to hold under a microscope in the most extreme way imaginable.
Is Citizen Vigilante an effective satire? Absolutely. Is it well shot, well acted, and does it get its point across? Yes and no. Personally, I think the satire is clear because almost nobody acts like this. Everybody is a caricature in one way or another, and their decision-making across the board is catastrophic in every conceivable way. I walked away from this movie thinking, “Wow, that Michael Sanders guy is a real jerk,” which I think is exactly the intent of the film.
The problem with satires like Citizen Vigilante, Starship Troopers, Fight Club, American Psycho, and Falling Down is that plenty of viewers will accept them at face value, and that’s where the danger lies.
At the end of the day, I think Citizen Vigilante accomplished what it set out to do. The problem with art is that once it’s let out into the wild, it no longer belongs to the artist. Some people, who will enjoy this movie for all the wrong reasons, will celebrate it because Michael Sanders is what they think is a badass, personified version of their own extreme beliefs. Those willing to peel back its layers will find that the film is actually a blatant criticism of that very mindset.
All that said, is Citizen Vigilante a very good movie? Eh. Just watch Falling Down.
As of this writing, Citizen Vigilante is available on-demand through YouTube, Google Play Movies, Apple TV+, and Fandango at Home.
Entertainment
AI just disproved a major math problem. A mathematician explains.
While the rest of the world was watching the World Cup on Sunday evening, mathematician Levent Alpöge casually announced on X that he had used Anthropic’s Fable 5 to disprove the Jacobian conjecture.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
The Jacobian conjecture is a long-standing open problem in algebraic geometry that’s bedeviled highly accomplished mathematicians for almost 90 years. It was included in “Smale’s problems,” a list of unresolved math problems put forward by mathematician Stephen Smale in 1998.
But that proved no obstacle for Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest frontier AI model. (You may remember Fable 5 as the public version of Claude Mythos Preview, the AI model that Anthropic says has such advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it was too dangerous for public release.)
Alpöge is part of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and his Linkedin profile notes an affiliation with Anthropic. We’ve reached out to Anthropic with questions about Alpöge’s work.
Meanwhile, for those of us who don’t understand polynomial functions from n-dimensional space, the question is: Does this represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence, or mathematics, or neither?
“This did not cause me to update my priors about what AI can and can’t do,” professor and mathematician Andrew Blumberg told Mashable. “This is exactly the kind of thing I would expect AI to be able to do. If there was a counterexample that was concise and easy to state that people haven’t found because it’s a pain to search through all this stuff, AI will find it.”
Blumberg, who has a joint appointment in mathematics and computer science at Columbia University, is involved in the First Proof project, an effort to test the capabilities of frontier large language models in solving research-level mathematics. So, it’s safe to say he understands mathematics and AI better than most of us.
Mashable Light Speed
‘You want to learn something from the answer’
Providing a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture is still a significant achievement for AI in mathematics, Blumberg notes. But he also says there’s a big difference between providing a positive proof for a major math problem and providing a single counterexample that disproves it. Here’s the metaphor Blumberg used to explain.
“Suppose that Moses came down from the mountain with tablets, and on the tablet was written, ‘Cancer can be cured.’ Would you care? You don’t just want the answer to the question. You want to learn something from the answer. And the reason Smale thought this problem was important is because he thought that if we solved it, we would understand more things about the about the way nature is structured.”
In other words, Blumberg says, “this counterexample tells us essentially nothing. It’s just, you know, there are a lot of polynomials, and it’s hard for people to check them all, but it’s not hard for machines.”
The Jacobian conjecture isn’t the only math problem AI has tackled in recent months. OpenAI announced in May an “internal model” had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a central conjecture in discrete geometry.
However, in that case, the result was more productive, Blumberg says. That’s because OpenAI didn’t just provide a counterexample — but a disproof of the problem itself.
“The disproof there already has led to interesting things because experts in the area unpacked what was going on in the disproof and then used it to do other things,” Blumberg says.
And that’s not necessarily the case with the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, he adds — while conceding he’s not expert enough to see if there’s something special about the structure of the counterexample that we can learn from. “But it’s not in and of itself interesting.”
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Entertainment
macOS 27 Beta has a secret Siri AI interface. How to try it.
You’ve waited long enough for Apple’s relaunch of Siri as an AI assistant, and now you can finally try out the Siri AI beta for iOS. But, psst, don’t tell anyone, but there’s even more Siri AI for you to try out with a secret Siri AI interface on Mac.
A Reddit user on the r/MacOSBeta subreddit has discovered a “hidden lightweight UI” for Siri AI in the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta. This feature basically provides users with an array of AI tools, presented in a pop-up menu whenever text is highlighted.
The Siri AI pop-up interface includes AI tools such as Rewrite, Proofread, “How does this sound?,” and “Edit with Siri.” There are also menu options for summarization and providing bullet points from the selected text.
Siri AI can also provide a selection of specific tools dependent on the context of what’s selected. For example, highlighting a phone number provides a pop-up to “Add to contacts” or when selecting an address the pop-up offers an “Open in Maps” option. There are tools for creating calendar events, composing messages and emails, and tracking flights and packages as well.
Why is the feature hidden? Well, as MacRumors points out, the Siri AI interface in macOS 27 developer beta 3 and public beta 1 is simply an unfinished product. Certain features don’t yet work how they’re supposed to. Some options don’t work at all. Clearly, Apple has yet to make it available because it’s simply not ready.
Mashable Light Speed
However, Reddit users say there is a way to turn the interface on in the macOS Golden Gate Beta. According to Redditor pdfu, if users running the macOS 27 beta simply need to open up the Terminal and input a few lines of code.
Please note: We do not recommend running terminal instructions or changing important OS files unless you fully understand what you’re doing. We have not tested these terminal instructions, so proceed at your own risk.
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool true
After that, the Reddit threat instructs users to restart their computer and the Siri AI interface will be enabled.
If you’ve had enough of the unfinished interface, you can turn it back off by once again opening Terminal and the following input:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false
It’s unclear if the Siri AI interface will launch with the official version of the new macOS. However, it’s certainly interesting to see Apple further brand its Siri AI relaunch as an all-in-one AI tool across the company’s products.
Entertainment
X-Men ‘97 Just Secretly Connected Itself To The Raunchiest Marvel Movies
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
As a longtime Marvel fan, one of my favorite things about X-Men ‘97 is how many fun Easter eggs are stuffed into every single episode. Sometimes, these are winking references to earlier episodes. More often than not, they are connections to the comics and to the larger Marvel universe. Of course, these references are often of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them variety. Because of this, you sometimes need to be as fast as Quicksilver on the remote control if you want to catch every wacky bit of trivia that pops up onscreen.
That was certainly the case with the recent episode “Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs.” This episode follows up on an earlier Animated Series episode (“Weapon X, Lies, and Video Tape”) and has Wolverine and a team of oddballs discovering major secrets about Weapon X. It’s an episode filled with some jaw-droppingly weird X-Men lore, including an appearance from everyone’s favorite xenomorph knock-offs, the Brood. However, that’s not the weirdest thing about this terrifying tale. The episode provides a list of characters attached to the Weapon X program, and if you pause at the right moment, you’ll see names from the raunchiest, bloodiest Marvel movies ever made: Deadpool and Logan!
The Ultimate In ’90s Media Technology
In Marvel Comics, it’s revealed that Weapon X wasn’t actually the name of the program. Instead, it was the Weapon Plus program, and Wolverine was referred to as “Weapon X” because he was the tenth experiment created by the program (X is the Roman numeral for 10). Incidentally, Weapon I was Captain America, who was turned into the world’s greatest soldier through an experimental super-serum. Later, the project switched to experimenting on mutants, with the goal of creating weaponized warriors who would be easy to control. There have been many characters experimented on or otherwise connected to the program, which is why so many names appear in “Weapon X, Lies, and DVD.”
The episode doesn’t get into the full tangled history of the program, which is consistently referred to as Weapon X. However, the characters do find test subject data on DVDs, all of which are helpfully labeled with the name of the person who was experimented on. One set of DVDs is very easy to view, and the other appears for only a brief moment. With the help of the pause button, though, you can identify some major names. This includes Bucky Barnes, better known to MCU fans as the Winter Soldier. It also includes characters who have only appeared in the comics, including the creepy villain, John Sublime.
The X-Men Get Raunchy
Unsurprisingly, Wolverine and his crew from this episode (including Maverick, Garrison Kane, Sabertooth, and Lady Deathstrike) all appear on the DVDs, as do other characters from Wolverine’s past, including Silver Fox. But for fans of the live-action movies, the most notable names that appear in the episode are Ajax and Deadpool (the villain and hero, respectively, of the first Deadpool movie) and X-23, who appeared in both Logan and Deadpool & Wolverine. Amusingly enough, this effectively connects the (mostly) family-friendly X-Men ‘97 with some of the raunchiest and most vulgar Marvel movies ever made!
Deadpool effectively paved the way for modern, R-rated superhero movies with a film that combined over-the-top ultraviolence and hilariously crass dialogue. It was also unapologetically raunchy, with a naughty Morena Baccarin sex scene that likely made the pre-cancerous Wade Wilson wish that his booty had a healing factor. Logan, meanwhile, was more serious but no less brutal, connecting X-23 (who was created for the kids’ show X-Men: Evolution) to a violent and heartbreaking film where we bid farewell to both Logan and Professor X. Now, that same character (who made a fan-favorite return in the wonderfully offensive Deadpool & Wolverine) is permanently tied to X-Men ‘97.
Does that mean we’re likely to see X-23 onscreen? Not really: even if X-Men ‘97 runs for several more seasons, there are so many ‘80s, ‘90s, and early ‘00s stories to adapt before the writers would ever get to her story. Deadpool might be likelier to appear: after all, he appeared in X-Men: The Animated Series via things like flashbacks and Morph transformations, and Morph continues to take on this appearance in X-Men ‘97. Is all of this leading up to a proper appearance from the Merc With a Mouth? Maybe. Somehow, though, I think Jean Grey will be too busy fighting Apocalypse to help Deadpool properly celebrate International Women’s Day!
Yankees confident in closer David Bednar vs. his former Pirates team
White Sox playing hard to beat, face challenge from Rangers
