Movie Review : The Art of Self-Defense (2019)
The best and worst thing about John Wick movies is that they aren’t real. They don't even pretend to be. Anyone old enough to buy their own beer knows you can’t pirouette through a nightclub, mowing down forty armed strangers, and still have perfect hair. And yet, every time somebody kills Keanu Reeves’ dog, you find yourself nodding along, thinking : yes, this requires wholesale bloodshed. John Wick works because it’s honest about being dishonest. It sells you the fantasy of proportional revenge in a world where proportionality doesn’t exist.
If such a revenge fantasy ever crash-landed in real life, it wouldn’t look like ballet. It would look like paperwork. It would look like bruises that don’t fade or bosses who smell weakness like blood in a koi pond. It would look more or less like Riley Stearns’ The Art of Self-Defense : a movie about what happens when the fantasy of fighting back gets filtered through karate lessons, office culture and the kind of masculinity that grows mold if left unchecked.
The Art of Self-Defense follows Casey (Jesse Eisenberg), a lonely, paper-thin accountant whose nightly routine includes buying dog food and trying not to get noticed. One evening he’s ambushed and ruthlessly beaten by thugs on motorcycles for no apparent reason other than he was the easiest target they could find that night. Suddenly Casey realizes his greatest skill (avoiding life) isn’t much of a survival strategy. So he flirts with the great American shortcut: buying a firearm.
But instead of embracing clean and impersonal violence, he wanders into a karate dojo run by a man (Alessandro Nivola) who looks like the kind of authority figure you’d respect until he starts to speak. The dojo offers him a rigid code, secret rules, and the promise that his fear can be converted into power if he just obeys. Casey is shoved out of his quiet, meaningless existence and into the kind of unknown that sells itself as self-improvement but that doesn't quite feel like that.
The Ponzi Scheme of Masculinity
This is a movie about what it means to be a man when masculinity is something that can be repossessed at any moment. Not that Casey had much collateral in the first place: his life revolved around an office cubicle and a dachshund, which is basically the canine equivalent of wearing a cardigan. But when that illusory sense of security is ripped away, he does what millions of scared men do: he goes shopping for strength as if it was something you can simply acquire.
That’s where The Art of Self-Defense gets interesting: Sensei isn’t selling empowerment, he’s selling an ideal. And that’s not the same thing. His argument is simple: start wearing the right signifiers of masculinity: speak louder than necessary, act like dominance is your default setting, blast the kind of heavy music that makes your neighbors think you own a punching bag and the world will start treating you like you matter. He’s not entirely wrong. He built himself an identity and a business model on exactly this principle.
The karate is just the scaffolding. The real product is an idea of manhood that works like cologne: invisible, intoxicating, and convincing mostly because everyone else buys into it. But you can feel the fallacy in the air at the dojo. Everyone’s insecure, like they’ve all bought stock in a company that doesn’t actually make anything. They’re willfully kept on their toes, chasing status the way Ponzi investors chase returns: always told the payoff is coming if they just stay loyal, just keep buying in.
Sure, they’re getting marginally better at martial arts every day, but that’s not the product they were promised. What they’re really purchasing is validation, and like any pyramid scheme, the closer you get to the top, the more obvious it becomes that the product doesn’t exist.
A Canary Named Anna
Insecure, but not stupid, Casey starts to see through Sensei’s rotten rhetoric thanks to Anna (played by the most awesomely named actress Imogen POOOOTS—sorry, I’m twelve). Anna is his sharpest student, the kind of disciplined fighter who should’ve earned her black belt years ago. But she hasn’t. And she never will, because Sensei’s empire isn’t built on merit, it’s built on masculinity as a gated community. When I said he was selling an idea instead of a martial art, I wasn’t exaggerating.
Anna is the only legitimate threat to his hegemony, which is why she’ll never be promoted. To acknowledge her skill would be to admit that his definition of strength is a scam.
That’s what finally enables Casey to start shopping for the thing he should’ve been shopping for all along: his own definition of masculinity. Fittingly, it shows up in the form of a new pet companion, because of course the John Wick parallel was always going to loop back on itself (it had to be assumed, I hope). The lesson isn’t that you need to become a spinning, gun-fu demigod. It’s that you need to choose a version of yourself that actually makes sense to you.
You don’t need to slaughter three thousand faceless henchmen to feel vindicated. You just need to draw a line and stand on the right side of it. It’s not glamorous, but it’s a kind of cool that doesn’t expire.
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I suspect The Art of Self-Defense slipped through the cracks because it efficiently undermines something people desperately want to believe in and refuses to swap in a sexier replacement. It’s not a hero’s journey; it’s a mirror held up to a collective delusion. The movie mocks us the way an intelligent high school bully mocks your shirt: not because the shirt is truly awful, but because deep down you know he’s right. That’s an uncomfortable sell in a culture where we’d rather buy empowerment than question what it’s made of.
Honestly, the main reason I spent two hours on it was because a Crustbag video mentioned my perennial favorties Full of Hell were on the soundtrack. And not only are they there, but the song choice is perfect. It's the least bro metal song I could think of. I’m glad I’ve seen The Art of Self-Defense anyway. I love movies that are mean to their own detriment.
7.3/10
(This is perhaps the most 7.3 movie ever made)
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