Starring Jesse Eisenberg and Alessandro Nivola. The Art of Self-Defence is a dark comedy about Casey. A Skinny, low self-esteem and zero confidence office worker who has a traumatic event. This leads him to take up Karate which will change his life for the better or worse.
This one kind of flew under my radar in 2019. I only heard of it a few weeks back so of course I had to watch it and give it a review.
Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) is your typical office worker living a mundane boring life doing the same thing every day. Going to work then going home where he lives by himself with his cute little Dachshund
The movie starts with Casey sitting awkwardly in a café reading the newspaper. A French couple wanders in and immediately start belittling him on the quite to themselves and that seems to be the story of Casey life. He tries to bond with his alpha male co-workers but his awkwardness just makes him come off weird and they tell him to get lost.
Everything in his life seems to remind you of the colour brown. His trousers are brown, his home is brown, his jacket is brown. One night he realises he has no dog food for his hungry dog so goes to the shop to get some. On his way to the shop, a pair on a bike stop by him and ask if he has a gun, Casey replies no. On his way back from the shop he hears the bikers coming up behind him so starts to run. They catch him, he immediately offers them his wallet but unprovoked, they attack. They don’t seem interested in his wallet at all. This time there’s about 5 of them and they beat the hell out of him.
When he gets out of the hospital, he has all of 1 message on his phone from his kind of nice guy boss who sounds generally worried and tells him to take off all the time he needs.
Casey wants to be able to protect himself so he looks into buying a gun. He has to wait a few weeks for his background checks to pass so on his way home he walks past a Karate school and decides to venture in.
The Sensei (Alessandro Nivola) is giving a lesson. You can see from the get-go there’s something a little off-key about the Sensei. He runs his dojo like a well-oiled machine with almost cult-like students where Karate is life. The whole thing feels very Cobra Kai.
Once the Sensei starts his indoctrinate like process, Karate becomes life for Casey too especially when he earns his Yellow belt. There is lots and lots of belt colour talk with students becoming insanely jealous when other students are awarded higher belts over them. Casey is all too proud of his yellow belts and even gets a bunch of coloured leather belts made for everyday use so he can wear his yellow belt all the time.
As the Sensei works on Casey, he implants all different aspects of what it is to be a man. Casey says he likes learning French in which case Sensei replies with you should learn a manly language like German, he should listen to metal music and get rid of his little dog in favour of a manly German shepherd. Casey becomes fascinated about Sensei secretive night classes and the mysterious belt stripe system. Like all his students, he starts to swallow whatever Sensei is serving.
Casey starts getting a twisted sense of what it is to be a man. When he returns to work his boss makes friendly chat and ever asks him over for dinner with his family, Casey replies by getting into stance and punching him in the throat. After he goes to the break room and starts ordering his co-workers about.
What starts as a kind of light hearted Karate Kid type dark comedy with the bullied kid taking up Karate starts to go more Fight Club and take up a sinister route. You find out the Sensei is pretty nuts and out of control all the while his cult students follow him. The only one who seems not completely under his control is dojo brown belt and junior instructor Anna (Imogen Poots). She even tries to warn Casey about the Sensei and what he’s getting himself into. Sensei’s twisted sense of what it is to be a man means he overlooks her for the dojo’s next blackbelt.
The ending is quite dark with Casey being remorseless in his actions. There no super feel-good ending as what you’d come to expect with this type of movie.
In conclusion, The Art of Self-Defence starts a little slow but intrigues you to keep watching on where it’s heading. The twist comes nearer the end which is definitely worth sticking about for. They’re not a super amount of fights and martial arts but this movie is more about manipulative Sensei and dojos which do exist in the real world than bullied school kids getting revenge.
The Art of Self-Defence is available to buy off Amazon now.
Rating: 3/5 Belts
