The Art of Self-Defense (2019)

Normally one wud expect some martial arts with such titles but there ain't any in this film. Dont know y most fellas r terming this as a dark comedy.

Only twice I laughed in the entire runtime. 1) Seeing the poster of the Grandmaster made me laugh more than the film. 2) The story about how the Grandmaster died is hilarious. That's it. Nothing else good bah this film.

Generous with 5 cos of the bad ass babe Poots smashing an opponent n Eisenberg's acting.

Fmovies: In this black comedy, Jesse Eisenberg is a wimpy office underling who is victimized by a criminal gang and because of his poor combat skills, decides to take up karate to protect himself and to improve his self-image and fighting spirit. He proves surprisingly adept in his training and advances steadily under the watchful eye of a puzzling, intimidating sensai.

Performances here are respectable, but hobbled by a screenplay that is choppy (no pun intended) before it loses luster and veers off to its surprise ending. Eisenberg does his best as a cardboard protagonist, the loser extraordinaire with a thankless job, a small dog, an '80s television set and who seemingly was born to fight absolutely no one. He is upstaged considerably by Alessandro Nivola who gives a formidable, bravado-driven performance as the magnetic sensai, the real life of the film. Imogen Poots is a welcome presence as the strong-willed sole female student. Even with a muddled script, the acting is enough to keep things afloat, just barely.

As long as credibility is not your test, this film could make for weird, passable entertainment. In a very narrow way, it succeeds as a silly diversion, chock full of deadpan humor, ferocious jolts and just enough taste for blood that the squeamish should be forewarned. In the end, however, it goes down as clever, if inconsistent comedy. Not recommended, except to esoteric and casual viewers.

Writer/director Riley Stearns' The Art of Self Defense has been called a "dark comedy." Maybe it is, but with so much dark and so little comedy, it would be better thought of as a psycho study of male impotence. That it doesn't have the light Jim Jarmusch touch as in The Dead Don't Die, where dry comic "Bill-Murray" reactions rule the raged zombie terrain, highlights the art of understated humor absent from Stearns' satire.

In today's world of women's ascendency into the macho sphere previously owned by men, Stearns has a serio-comic thriller in an indeterminate time with echoes of Fight Club and any men's magazine that features gun ownership and boobs in the same issue. The Art of Self Defense is anything but about art; it is a dense, dark, melancholic cautionary tale of a 30-something milquetoast, Casey (Jesse Eisenberg), who becomes a menace through the "art" of karate.

Besides the overly-long set up, this film has a challenge to strike the right balance between the dreary life of an introvert and the dangerous world of violence and misogyny, not dull but disquieting. The film is effective showing the almost exclusive male training in artful macho that discriminates against a woman (Anna, played by Imogen Poots) by stifling her ambition and relegating her to a boiler room for a locker room.

Casey embodies the wrong-headed notion that courage can come from a punch and a kick. As for an equalizing gun, it is not for the weak as the dojo's rules claim. Casey will have his own take. His sensei (Alessandro Nivola) must face his pupil as avenging angel.

The Art of Self Defense is not for most regular film goers: It's slow and unsure of its tone. For the discriminating audience, however, it offers a skewered perspective on the hobbling of timid spirits by substituting violence for sympathy and force for understanding.

In the hands of rank amateurs, the defense should be for themselves against themselves. Fight Club or Karate Kid this is not. Like them it is in its minimal humor. Dark comedy? not so much.

The Art of Self-Defense fmovies. In my estimation, The Art of Self-Defense is straight-up bad. Left-leaning culture vultures are likely to sing its praises, but unless you're already sympathetic to conceits of the type that appeal to such people, you'll likely sit in the theatre and sleep or wonder when the film will end. I don't recommended this mess of a movie.

The Art of Self-Defense has a lot more to offer than the good old fun it seems to be at first. It follows the story of Casey, a nerdy accountant with very little social skill, and a total pushover by every possible measure, a role which, obviously, fits Jesse Eisemberg perfectly.

Casey doesn't have much going on in his life, but on the surface, he seems perfectly content to let other people step all over him. As long as they leave him alone for the most part, he's happy to go on with his frighteningly boring routine.

However, one night, Casey gets attacked by a mob of a few bikers, who mug him and mostly beat him up badly enough to send him to the hospital. After his painful recovery, Casey stumbles upon a Karate class, and decides to join it. But the eccentric Sensei (Alessandro Nivola) soon turns out to have a lot more to teach than Karate moves - he teaches an entire way of life, one that will put Casey on an entirely new path, one that threatens to change him to the very core.

Now it would be easy to summarize the film as a satire on hypermasculinity, but yes, on the surface, what Sensei is preaching is essentially for his pupils to become some sort of hyper virile, violent beings defined only by their strength - and the film is pushing this to the extreme and spinning it on its head to hilarious effect. But on a deeper level, what this is really about is Casey's journey from being weak, to being strong, and what are the moral repercussions of exerting that strength. What does it mean to stand up for oneself, and then for others? In many aspects, what the film explores is how strength and its intrinsic values lead to various forms of conflict, to confrontation, and what are the consequences of dealing with these forms of conflict?

All I can say without spoiling, is that the film explores this theme with a fresh, and most often, hilarious point of view, and it's definitely worth seeing for that reason, if not for the terrific performances of the leads (including Imogen Poots, who I didn't get a chance to mention to avoid spoilers).

I was keen to watch this after seeing the trailer and noting how many positive reviews this had. So I was very surprised to see just how bad this was. Its billed as a dark comedy about martial arts however it simply isnt very funny. I had even saw a female reviewer on YouTube compare this Napoleon Dynamite. Simply how? It has nothing in common with Napoleon and the style of humour is very different and in this movie 99% of the jokes fall flat. There is a serious issue with the tone of the movie in that it takes itself far too seriously for the humour to work. Dark humour is probably the most difficult to pull of correctly and this movie is a good example of why thats the case. There are more reviews online now of this movie and they are slowly pulling down its rating and they appear to cite the same issues and that its underwhelming. I would go so far as to say it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. While I was expecting something like The Foot Fist Way, this movie has nothing positive to say about martial arts. It basically portrays martial artists as psychopaths so anyone with a background in martial arts may feel insulted that this is how the disciplines are portrayed. Also there are a number of extremely violent/gory scenes which come out of the blue and are another indication that the director simply has the tone of the movie wrong. If anything it overplays the effectiveness of karate, we now know exactly what professional MMA fighters can do to each other because of UFC and the sound effects and violence portrayed in this is actually more extreme based on supposedly part time karate students. This brings me to the final point. Realism. You can only suspend your disbelief so far. At no point during the first 70 or 80 mins is this movie seen as a surrealist story. However when bodies start to pile up and theres no consequences then it can only be a surrealist story? This is a poorly judged movie which is extremely negative about martial arts, gore and violence which doesn't fit with the tone, humour which simply doesn't work and cannot decide whether this is a crime movie or fantasy. The only positive reviews seem to come from critics who overly praise indie movies and who feel clever for watching crap the mainstream ignores. There are decent art house movies, but this isnt one of them.