I just saw Supergirl and Citizen Vigilante. One has an anti-hero violently and ruthlessly dispatching sex traffickers with foreign accents with maximum violence and minimum remorse and the other is Citizen Vigilante. Neither movie contains a moral arc. The only difference is that Supergirl does it in a children’s movie. Seriously. The Only Difference Between Supergirl and Citizen Vigilante Is That One Is For Kids.

In one corner, you’ve got Citizen Vigilante, Uwe Boll’s latest fever dream starring Armie Hammer as a guy who gets fed up and starts ruthlessly ventilating bad guys, violent criminals, sex traffickers, corrupt officials, and apparently a lot of dudes with the wrong accents. No hand-wringing. No “maybe violence isn’t the answer” montage. Just boom, headshot, next victim. The end. He’s an anti-hero doing what the system won’t, and the movie doesn’t pretend otherwise.

In the other corner: Supergirl. A bright, colorful children’s superhero flick where our girl in the cape teams up for an interstellar revenge quest against… a gang of space pirate losers who kidnap women for forced marriages and sex slavery. She and her little buddy violently dispatch these foreign-accented d-bags with zero remorse, zero lectures about due process in deep space, and zero moral arc. Just laser eyes, punches that would make Mike Tyson blush, and yes, even a bloody sword pressed into the throat of one. It’s rated PG-13 so parents can feel good about dropping their kids off.

What’s the difference between these two movies? Seriously. Spell it out for me like I’m five (but not in a way that gets the movie banned in twelve countries).

Citizen Vigilante is treated like a dangerous right-wing manifesto that makes film critics clutch their pearls and type furiously about “subversive” exploitation trash. Uwe Boll made it, for goodness sake. The guy who turned video game adaptations into blood-soaked performance art. People lose their minds because the bad guys have foreign accents and the hero doesn’t cry about it afterward. It’s “problematic.” It’s “punching down.” It’s going to radicalize the suburbs or whatever the outrage machine is peddling this week.

Meanwhile, Supergirl does the exact same thing in a colorful suit but wraps it in a sparkly Kryptonian cape and aims it at the Saturday matinee crowd. Galactic sex traffickers get their butts handed to them by a superpowered teen girl who learned exactly one lesson: punch harder. No redemption. No therapy session with the last surviving trafficker.

Just pure, unfiltered gruesome violence for the greater good. And because it’s a big shiny DC movie with a female lead, it’s “empowering” and “necessary.” The villains are space incels or brigands or whatever the press release calls them this week, but heaven forbid we call them what they are: cartoonishly evil human traffickers with foreign accents getting their comeuppance in front of an audience that still believes in the tooth fairy.

Neither movie bothers with a moral arc. That’s the hilarious part. Citizen Vigilante doesn’t suddenly decide vigilantism is bad after the third montage of Armie Hammer curb-stomping rapists. Supergirl doesn’t have Kara Zor-El sit down for a heartfelt conversation about the cycle of violence with the guy who was about to sell her friend into slavery. Both films are like, “These guys are bad. They die now. Roll credits.”

The real difference is marketing and who gets to be the hero. One is a low-budget Boll joint that dares to point the gun at uncomfortable real-world targets. The other is a multimillion-dollar corporate product that does the same thing but in space, with better VFX and a soundtrack that goes whoosh. One gets called fascist-adjacent. The other gets a tie-in Happy Meals.

As it stands, one is “problematic” and the other is wholesome family entertainment.

Hollywood isn’t confused about violence. They just know exactly which targets are safe to pulp in front of children. The rest is branding. Pass the popcorn, and try not to think too hard about the fact that the kids’ movie has the higher body count. Way higher.