The Gardener 2025
Sinopsis
Every year the Prime Minister has a list of all kinds of troublemakers eliminated in the name of the famous Reason of State. Serge Shuster, Special Adviser to the President of the Republic, finds himself on this list, better known as the Matignon List. Condemned to certain death and at the heart of an implacable plot and a state secret that also put his family in danger, Serge, his wife and children have only one hope left – their gardener, Léo, who hates it when « slugs » invade his garden… Especially those that want to kill innocent families.
Pameran Pemain
- Jean-Claude Van Damme as Leo
- Nawell Madani as Mia
- Michaël Youn as Serge Shuster
- Jérôme Le Banner as Phoebus
- Rayan Bouazza as Hornet 2
- David Charhon as Didier le chevelu
- Matthias Quiviger as Esmeralda
- Poqssi as Alice (Carla Poquin)
- Stanislas Carmont as Alexandre
- Kaaris as Quasimodo
- Elie Semoun as Dr. Rouma
- Carl-Philipp Wengler as Hornet 3
- Vincent Desagnat as Policier Ministère
Review
The Gardener (Le Jardinier), not to be confused with the Gary Daniels/Robert Bronzi film, reunites Jean-Claude Van Damme (Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Timecop) and David Charhon (On the Other Side of the Tracks, Castaways) who directed him in The Last Mercenary. And like that film, it’s an action comedy, but with the comedy dialed up a bit higher, and the action a bit more on the brutal side.
This time out, The Muscles From Brussels plays Leo, a man who simply wants to tend to plants on the large estate owned by Serge Shuster (Michaël Youn; Around the World in 80 Days, Divorce Club) Special Adviser to the President of France. Nobody seems quite sure how he ended up with the position, and they think he’s a bit odd, but he does a good job so they’ve let him stay on.
Serge and his highly dysfunctional family, his wife Mia (Nawell Madani; Head in the Clouds, Thicker Than Water) their infant daughter Charlotte, and Alice (Carla Poquin) his daughter from a previous marriage are spending some time at the estate. They’re unaware that Serge has been marked for death by the Prime Minister, part of an annual culling of troublesome personages. But they’re going to find out soon enough when a covert ops team show up to take them out.
The script by Charhon, Vincent De Brus (The Ballad of Titus, Cendres) and Sebastien Fechner (La Dream Team, Le Carton) takes a familiar path, pairing the lethal Leo with the hapless Serge and baby Charlotte as they take on the France’s finest and the three so-called Angels of Death, code-named Phoebus (Jérôme Le Banner; Asterix at the Olympic Games, Babylon A.D.), Esmeralda (Matthias Quiviger; Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom, 14 Days to Feel Better) and Quasimodo (Kaaris; The Bouncer, Rogue City).
Although he’s best known as an action hero, Van Damme has proven he can do comedy in his show Jean-Claude Van Johnson, and films like Welcome To the Jungle and, of course, JCVD. Here, when he’s not trading punches with the bad guys, he’s funny in a deadpan way as the gardener with a mysterious, and deadly, past.
Most of the more obvious gags go to Youn, who is apparently a well-known comic in his native country. He does have some funny moments, such as when he confronts the murderous trio, jacked up on adrenaline and wearing an SS officer’s uniform, all scored to “It’s Raining Men”. Unfortunately, he can also be extremely irritating in a Kevin Hart sort of way. Maybe some of the humour was lost in translation, or maybe it’s considered funny in France, but a lot of it didn’t work for me. More than once, I wanted Van Damme to knock his ass out so I didn’t have to listen to him.
While he doesn’t unfortunately, he does get to kick a goodly amount of ass and look good doing it. While I’m sure his double did most of the fighting, Van Damme himself looks better than he has in a while. The action scenes, mostly fights with a car chase towards the end, look good, stunt coordinator Laurent Demianoff (Knife + Heart, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) and his team do a solid job putting delivering the film’s mayhem.
One thing I wasn’t happy with however was the film’s dialogue. The Gardener is a French film, but the print I saw was in English, and it appeared that most of the cast was dubbed. In several scenes, the actor’s lips very clearly didn’t match what they were saying. Van Damme at least did his own English dialogue, and some of the others may have as well, but it frequently sounded like their lines had been added in after the fact. They should just have gone the Netflix route and subtitled it.
Overall, though, I found The Gardener to be a fun film and better than several of Van Damme’s recent films, especially the disappointing Kill ‘Em All 2. The film’s final act even manages to recall Universal Soldier in some ways without going into sci-fi territory. The result is a decent action comedy, even if the jokes didn’t always work for me.
