Armie Hammer (left) and Uwe Boll. It’s like the plot of a B-movie in itself.
Armie Hammer‘s attempted comeback this month is in a film project from a director whose work has been so maligned that he once challenged his critics to a boxing match, and violently beat the snot out of the scribes who dared to face him.
German director Uwe Boll has been dubbed “the world’s worst director” by Vanity Fair, and he’s received a Worst Career Achievement (dis)honor by the Golden Raspberry Awards (aka the Razzies). Even the Wikipedia entry for Boll opens by saying that three of his films — “House of the Dead” (2003), “Alone in the Dark” and “BloodRayne” (both 2005) — are “considered three of the worst films ever made.”
One of his former stars, late Quentin Tarantino fave Michael Madsen, called a Boll project he starred in, “an abomination,” according to a 2017 VF profile. But Madsen then also told the mag: “If he called me up tomorrow to be in a movie, I’d sign up in a heartbeat.”
If that wasn’t enough, Entertainment Weekly reported in 2008 that film fans launched an online petition demanding Boll mercifully quit the biz for his cinematic crimes. (The director said he’d throw in the towel if the signatures hit 1 million.)
But after announcing his retirement a decade ago, Boll’s back with “Citizen Vigilante,” and he’s found a new leading man in Hammer — the fallen former A-lister who was dumped by Hollywood. In the film, out June 19, Hammer stars as a vigilante killer. Like a cross between “American Psycho” and “Death Wish,” the pitch sums it up as: “The film follows an American businessman living abroad (Hammer) whose campaign against criminals turns him into a social media phenomenon while placing him increasingly at odds with law enforcement.”
Hammer and Boll are participating in a “virtual roundtable” discussion with journalists this week. And Hammer is doing a sit-down with at least one major publication as he tries to revive his acting career, we hear.
The “Social Network” star has been fielding offers via attorney Todd Rubenstein at Yorn Levin after he was previously let go by his publicity rep as well as his former agency, WME, amid the bizarre sex scandal that halted his career. (We hear that a former WME agent has also been advising him behind-the-scenes.)
Hammer was accused of sexual assault, as well as infamously having cannibalistic fantasies, but he strongly denied the allegations saying it was all consensual. Los Angeles prosecutors in 2023 declined to charge the actor with any wrongdoing. Hammer told his side of the story in a 2023 AirMail interview.
Last week, he was spotted by paps at a Hollywood Hills eatery — after a lengthy absence from showbiz that even supposedly saw him selling timeshares in the Cayman Islands — with a model and social media strategist, named Reagan Newman. And last month he was also seen strolling in West Hollywood.
Tapping into Boll’s long-simmering oeuvre of populist outrage, the canceled actor’s new movie shows him seemingly taking on some “deep state” subjects as a dapper assassin who gains a following on social media. “The state, the court, the police. You think they’re here to help you… but they’re here to control you,” his character says. “You walk down the street and you get stabbed or robbed. What does your country do? Nothing. What if everything they ever taught you was utter nonsense.”
The film was shot in Croatia last year and sold at the American Film Market, (the used car lot of foreign-filmed action and horror movies in Santa Monica that attracts a particular and peculiar mix of international glamour ghouls). Reflecting Boll’s unending chutzpah, the film was originally even called “The Dark Knight.”
Like a more aggressive version of B-movie legend Roger Corman or Troma Entertainment’s Lloyd Kaufman (“The Toxic Avenger” franchise), Boll is a provocateur who seems to be (sort of) in on the joke. Back to that boxing match where he brutally knocked out his critics, Boll put the event on pay-per-view and used the footage in a movie called “Postal” with a one-sheet that crowed, “Disgusting. Offensive. Stupid.”
He “retired” by uploading a YouTube video entitled, “F–k You All,” while the tagline for one of his other films, “Rampage: President Down,” was, “F–k the System.”
His new Hammer movie has already reportedly been banned in Germany. (Reps for the film and Hammer did not comment.)
Like Corman and Kaufman, who collectively worked with A-list movie stars like De Niro, Nicholson and Costner before they made it, Boll has somehow worked with actors including Ben Kingsley, Elisabeth Moss, Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, J.K. Simmons and John Hurt, among others, even while The New York Times once wrote that one of his films was, “so inept on every level, you wonder why the distributor didn’t release it straight to video, or better, toss it directly into the trash.”
Hammer appeared last year in the low-budget Western “Frontier Crucible,” which did not make much of an impression, and he has booked the thriller “Night Driver” as well as a film called “Mascotland.”
Some of Boll’s past films were reportedly made so cheaply, they turned a profit on home video and his investors (“dentists,” he’s said) did well. But after the video boom, he told VF: “It’s just not worth it anymore to make a movie if you don’t get any revenues. I’m very happy about a lot of movies I did… At the same time, you can’t live in a self-delusion.”
He’s now back with the Hammer film as his latest hope. And while Danny Boyle had success with the “28 Days Later” franchise, Boll has his own zombie movie in the works, “23 Years Later.” It’s a planned sequel to “House of the Dead.”
