The Art of Self-Defense is a 2019 satirical black comedy martial arts film from writer/director Riley Stearns (Faults, Dual). It stars Jesse Eisenberg, Alessandro Nivola, and Imogen Poots. The film had its world premiere at SXSW in March 2019 before receiving a theatrical release in July.
After a mugging from a motorcycle gang, mild-mannered bookkeeper Casey Davies (Eisenberg) comes across a neighborhood karate dojo and begins taking classes to learn how to protect himself.
Casey gains a newfound sense of confidence for the first time in his life, and gains new connections in hardcore brown belt Anna (Poots) and his charismatic, mysterious instructor Sensei (Nivola), who takes a special liking to him that leads him into a sinister world of fraternity, brutality, and hyper-masculinity.
Not to be confused with a 1941 cartoon short of the same name starring Goofy.
This film provides examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Past: The film is very heavily implied to be set in the late 90s, as the computers correspond to that era, there are no references to the internet, no cellphones anywhere and Sensei records his snuff films on VHS tapes.
- Action Girl: Anna is a girl and the best student at the dojo.
- Anti-Climax: At the climax of the film, after Casey has found out about all the despicable things Sensei has done, he challenges him to a fight to the death in unarmed combat. Sensei accepts and the next scene has them preparing to square off once and for all...and then Casey pulls out a gun and shoots Sensei in the head, killing him immediately.
- Artistic License – Martial Arts: Zig-zagged. Despite claiming to teach karate, Sensei apparently incorporates techniques from other disciplines, and has a picture of Aikido founder Morihei Ueshiba in the dojo. While this could be justified under the rule of "If it works, use it", Sensei's bizarre monologues and Ice Cream Koans make it quite vague as to how experienced he really is. Not to mention Grandmaster's "secret technique" of simply shooting someone.
- Asshole Victim: Sensei, first and foremost, but Thomas also counts due to his murder of Casey's dachshund.
- Bait the Dog: Sensei and the night and day class are seemingly like any class....
- Benevolent Boss: Grant, Casey's boss who gives him a five-week extension on his leave of absence and even takes money out of his own pocket for Casey's paycheck. When he invites Casey to dinner with him and his wife, he gets punched in the throat.
- Bilingual Backfire: Subverted. Casey is within earshot of a French couple who mock him mercilessly in French. After a cut, Casey is listening to educational tapes on learning French, revealing that he understood the couple's insults but was too timid to call them out on it.
- Book Dumb: Sensei is a smooth talker and incredible schemer, but requires a calculator to perform simple math.
- Bond One-Liner: Played for Laughs. Casey purposefully prepared two options for after he kills Sensei via Boom, Headshot!, and delivers both not wanting to second guess himself later.1. You would say using [the gun] makes me a weak man, and without question it does. But I'm alive and you are dead...so I would argue that makes you the weaker man.
2. I didn't play by the rules...but there never were any rules. - Boom, Headshot!: Casey kills Sensei this way after tricking him into thinking they will have a hand-to-hand fight to the death.
- Chekhov's Gun: The handgun that Casey attempts to buy in the beginning is the same one he uses to kill Sensei.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Casey goes a little nuts after he gets his yellow belt, becoming briefly obsessed with the color. He buys all the yellow food he can find, and orders a custom yellow leather belt (and several more for his dojo).
- Besides the belt progression, stripes of tape are added for particular achievements. Black means invitation to the night class, red means the person is an instructor. It also means the person has killed an opponent.
- Combat Pragmatist: Casey decides in the film's final act to bring a gun to a martial arts fight. Adios, Sensei.
- Cut Himself Shaving: Thomas claims he is wearing bandages on his wrist because he sprained it while playing guitar. Actually, it is covering up a bite mark he got while killing Casey's dachshund. Casey has him executed after seeing the mark.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: At the climax, Casey challenges Sensei to a duel to the death for ownership of the dojo. Casey shoots him with a concealed handgun the second the battle begins and declares victory.
- Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Played with. While introducing the dojo’s late grandmaster to the class, Sensei tells the story of how he killed several other grandmasters with his trademark technique of punching his index finger through their skulls, a technique that Sensei himself was never taught. Because it was all a lie.
- Disposing of a Body: Sensei turned his equipment room into a morgue, complete with cremator. He uses it to burn Henry's corpse.
- Driven to Suicide: Henry is ejected from the dojo (and maimed by Sensei) for coming to the night class without invitation, and is later found to have hung himself in the locker room.
- Doesn't Like Guns: Sensei abhors the use of guns and thinks those who use them are weak, due to his sensei being killed by one.
- Embarrassing First Name: Casey, who is frequently mistaken for a woman because of his name. Sensei's first name is Leslie.
- Establishing Character Moment:
- Casey is shown to be extremely timid and non-confrontational in each of the first few scenes of the film.
- Sensei is first seen giving his students a ridiculous lesson about forming words with their karate, followed by a pantomime of him killing a man, yet he remains unflinchingly serious from start to finish.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Sensei expels Henry from the school and gruesomely breaks Henry's arm for attending the night class without an invitation, but says he can't take Henry's belt away because he earned it fairly.
- Faux Affably Evil: Sensei is generally friendly with Casey, but he also staged Casey's mugging in an attempt to initiate him and "turn his life around", and he also blackmails former students into paying membership fees even after they left the dojo.
- Felony Misdemeanor: Sensei's dojo adheres to its set of rules with utmost conviction, such that Casey unintentionally stepping onto the mat with shoes is treated as an egregious offense.
- Foreshadowing: Sensei gets Casey a German Shepherd with a note that says "Let him know who's the alpha or he will rip your throat out in your sleep." After finding out Thomas killed his dachshund, Casey brings the German shepherd out and says he established his role as the alpha before siccing him on Thomas. The dog goes for the throat.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: Early in the film Casey discusses winning a gift card in a raffle at his Boss's party. The same gift card can be seen in Sensei's drawer while Casey is snooping, having been stolen earlier.
- French Jerk: In the first scene, a French couple at a donut shop hurl scorn on everything in their eye line.
- Furnace Body Disposal: Sensei has a crematorium in his office, which he uses to dispose of Henry's dead body.
- Gory Discretion Shot:
- Subverted for Sensei graphically breaking Henry's elbow.
- At the end of the film, Thomas getting his throat ripped out by a dog is not shown, just the sounds of it and the aftermath.
- Groin Attack: During a sparring session, Anna kicks Thomas twice in the groin while she has him in a figure-four rear naked choke.
- Guns Are Worthless: Averted hard in the finale, where Casey kills Sensei with a single shot to the head during their duel.
- The film in general takes a surprisingly measured view of guns as a whole. Namely, Casey's attempt to purchase a gun does feature him filling out the paperwork and awaiting a background check, subverting the portrayal in many films that guns can be bought instantly. However, the salesman also mentions the various statistical drawbacks of firearm ownership, such as having an increased likelihood of being shot in violent incidents, and being more at risk of suicide.
Salesman: (with no sense of irony) You're really gonna love owning a gun. - Head Lock Of Dominance: Anna puts Thomas in a figure-four rear naked choke and kicks him twice in the groin while doing so, continuing to squeeze his neck until he passes out, despite Thomas desperately tapping out. She then proceeds to smash his face in with her elbows, while he's unconscious.
- He-Man Woman Hater: Sensei frequently uses Anna's womanhood against her.
- Hypocritical Humor: Sensei says that "Casey" is a feminine-sounding name. Casey later learns that Sensei's real name is Leslie, which he points out sounds more feminine than Casey.
- Ice-Cream Koan: Sensei often speaks them, though bizarrely they seem to work as his students do indeed learn to kick with their hands and punch with their feet.
- At the end of the film, Anna teaches the class how to be Brutally Tolerant and Peacefully Savage.
- Inelegant Blubbering: After failing to stand up to a bigger guy who dinged his door, Casey drives home sobbing hysterically.
- I Was Beaten by a Girl: Thomas gets brutally beaten-up by Anna during a sparring session.
- Karma Houdini:
- Casey kills an undercover cop after he shoots Anna during the dojo gang's motorcycle run. He doesn't get caught for it.
- The other members of the dojo beat up and antagonized Casey while pretending to be a motorcycle gang. Only one of them suffers for it.
- Kick the Dog: Thomas does this literally, off screen, killing Casey's dachshund. Casey later murders him for it (and also trying to kill him at the start of the film).
- Klingon Promotion: Casey shoots Sensei to death during their duel and declares himself the new master. The other night-class students obey out of a combination of loyalty and fear. It is then inverted where he declares Anna the new master and takes over her spot as teacher of the children's class.
- It's implied that the late Grand Master did this as well.
- Male Frontal Nudity: After a class, most of the men casually undress to their underwear to stretch, while one man goes fully nude. Casey is weirded out.
- Meaningful Echo: "There never were any rules." Casey hears it first as a Pre-Mortem One-Liner said by the hero of an old movie right before he guns down his archenemy, and uses it for himself as a Bond One-Liner after killing Sensei.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Anna delivers one to Thomas out of rage at not being promoted to black belt.
- Obvious Rule Patch: The Dojo's ten rules are printed on a large sign and hung on the wall. An 11th rule was added as a smaller sign at the end: "Guns are for the weak."
- Poke the Poodle: Casey gets mad at Anna and decides to rebel by breaking the Dojo rules: Wearing shoes on the mat, eating on the mat, and spitting out water because the rule said "Stay Hydrated".
- Police Are Useless: Despite the numerous violent crimes in the movie, the police are never contacted. An undercover officer misses an easy gunshot to stop the assailants and doesn't even defend himself when Casey beats him to death.
- Rape as Drama: Anna got her red stripe when she killed another student who tried to rape her in the locker room. Sensei blamed Anna for tempting him, which makes Anna plot his downfall.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Grant, Casey's boss, is a seriously Nice Guy who allows Casey to take all the time he needs after his mugging and checks in on him. He even takes money out of his own pocket to give Casey a paycheck during his absence. He gets punched in the throat for his efforts.
- Right-Hand Attack Dog: Casey trains his German Shepard to be this at the end of the film, and has Thomas mauled in revenge for killing his previous dog.
- Snuff Film: Sensei films his students assaulting random civilians and edits the footage to sell on the black market, as well as blackmail for regular "membership" payments. Casey himself would have been killed on camera if not for Anna tricking them.
- The Smurfette Principle: Anna is the only female member of the dojo, and the only prominent female character in the film. Justified since she's in an environment that promotes toxic masculinity and she's struggling to prove herself despite that.
- Testosterone Poisoning: Sensei is all about advocating this trope through his karate lessons. He even convinces Casey—who enjoys adult contemporary music, is learning French, and owns a Dachshund—to become "manlier" by listening to heavy metal, learning German, and getting a German shepherd after sending Thomas to kill his Dachshund while deriding his interests as not being manly enough. This eventually takes a darker turn after it's made clear that Sensei's idea of masculinity, while laughable at times, is actually very toxic and harmful.
- There Are No Rules: Casey watches a movie early on where a character says this before shooting another. Casey repeats this after shooting Sensei.
- Thug Dojo: Casey joins the dojo while hoping he can become more confident after he was mugged, but it's eventually made clear that the dojo itself is this trope. Not only does Sensei hold a "night class" that's much more brutal than the day classes, it turns out that he and the other members of the dojo were the ones who mugged Casey to begin with, and they're also not above killing people.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: Casey briefly becomes a lot meaner after he takes Sensei's advice about becoming "manlier" to heart, even going so far as to punch his Benevolent Boss in the throat.
- White Collar Worker: Casey is initially working as an accountant in a bland firm, where it's shown that he doesn't fit in well with his coworkers.
- Whole-Plot Reference: To Fight Club, about an awkward and aimless office worker who narrowly falls into the trap of violence as an outlet for toxic masculinity, fights for dominance under a charismatic leader, is a part of an organization that's secretly full of criminals, and eventually kills the leader. The fact that the film is implied to be set in the late 90s drives this home further.
- Your Other Left: Said by Casey to the German shepherd when it goes the wrong way after being sicced on Thomas.
