The old movie stars had it right when they said dying is easy, but comedy is hard.
The Art of Self-Defense proves that old adage as we watch Casey (Jesse Eisenberg), a lonely bean counter, suffer a debilitating mugging and subsequently take up karate lessons. Though billed as a dark comedy, what we see on screen succeeds more in agitating than amusing.
If you’re going into Self-Defense expecting a few good chuckles, you won’t be disappointed. However, the movie’s end result makes you wonder why filmmakers don’t outsource jokes from comedians.
A short lesson in humor would have served writer/director Riley Stearns (Faults) well. Simply put, male inadequacy is funny. (See: Woody Allen or George Costanza.) Hyperdominant male violence, on the other hand, is not funny at all. Ignoring this subtle comedic guideline sadly drains the film of much of its attempted humor.
And while subtlety and timing are necessary to make dark topics humorous, subtlety is exactly what this movie abandons first. Don’t expect a nuanced view of hard-hitting cultural topics. What we get looks and sounds more like an undergraduate treatise on male violence, gun control and — weirdly —animal husbandry.
Like Fight Club (a comparison one simply cannot avoid making), Self-Defense has a few things to say about manhood and what it means to be a man. Unlike the former, however, the commentary proves to be little more than a simplistic caricature of men as unthinking drones who blindly associate violence with power. Again, subtlety and context prove to be the dragons this movie winds up slaying.
Its simplistic message sufficiently made, the film hangs around for its entire 104-minute duration to pick up every last bit of low-hanging fruit. Halfway through, you’ll be saying, “OK, OK. I get it, I get it.” But the hits keep coming.
With its humor abandoned for punditry and virtually no characters to care about except Casey’s dog, what’s left of the movie feels like a feature-length student film with muted colors, performances of the Napoleon Dynamite variety and somber scenery. Not a bad student film, mind you, but rather a very good one that just happens to lack a mature and consistent message suitable for an exploration of human nature’s darker corners.
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