The Gardener (Le jardinier, 2025) Movie Review: Jean-Claude Van Damme stars in this goofy but fun home invasion actioner

Jean-Claude Van Damme is now 64 years old. As hard as it is to believe for some of us who have seen the Belgian martial artist rock the silver screen in the late 80s and early 90s, the action star’s charisma is intact, even though he can’t move as fast as lightning anymore. Everyone, including Van Damme, in David Charhon’s French action-comedy “The Gardener” (Le jardinier) is completely aware of the star being old, making the quick pivot to doubling down on the goofiness of his charm. The result is a tonally inconsistent but fun ‘’a-force-to-reckon-with” hero’s possibly last battle cry when intruders step on his land (quite literally).

While this is a typical assassination plot gone wild, the low budget and constraints of the location flip the genre over its head and turn it into a home invasion of sorts. Michaël Youn plays Serge Shuster – a senior official of the presidency currently enjoying his work-from-home lifestyle in his remote vacation home on an offshore island with his wife Mia (Nawell Madani), an uber cute newborn, and young daughter Alice (Carla Poquin) from an earlier marriage. Apart from housekeeper Jeanne (Danielle Renault), the only possible soul on the property is the weird, secluded gardener Leo (Jean-Claude Van Damme).

Director Charhon is not eager to set things up before amping up the premise. The plot dives headfirst into momentum as Serge’s home is attacked by armed individuals. The mercenaries – headed by a beefy Phoebus (Jerome Le Banner) and two weirdly eccentric foot-soldiers Quasimodo (Kaaris), and Esmerelda (Matthias Quiviger) whose code names are inspired by “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” for some odd reason, are in the possession of a kill list that has Serge’s name on it. The dial-up and dial-down nature of the narrative, which is also unaware of what tone to really go for, is bothersome. A viewer might not be up for the confusing interplay right away.

A still from The Gardener (Le jardinier, 2025).

I mean, if the aim was to let the mercenaries be dealt with by the gardener in a fashion that feels silly but fun, then the tonality should have stuck to it. However, Charhon is also interested in giving gravitas to the act of killing or to the reasons why Leo favors his peace and quiet – dealing with his plants, rather than being an assassin with a certain set of skills. He also offers us with a character introduction to Serge, a loof trying to get into the cabinet as a finance minister, but struggling to help his wife deal with the infant in the house, and the teenager who is not interested in anything other than the music on her phone.

It’s an interesting way to go into the movie’s eventual action, but Charhon never settles. This results in two acts of goofy cat-and-mouse where Serge and Leo bond with each other when they have to hide in the property’s war room. These scenes play out and rely heavily on slapstick comedy that only lands occasionally. And since so much time is spent on doing this, the stakes never feel high, leading the action to feel stilted and only a part of the foreground. The eventual mash of extreme violence and comedy might not feel like the right mix for a large part of the audience. At some point, the plot also gets repetitive and jarringly uninteresting.

However, the cackling chemistry between Van Damme and Youn somehow makes things work. Even though the film suddenly wants it to be taken seriously, the charm of Van Damme’s screen presence, coupled with Youn’s dedication to commit to the wackiness of his character, makes “The Gardner” (Le jardinier) a fun time. I just wish the hand-to-hand combat, or all the other action sequences, were better choreographed and played out in a way that would make things a bit tense.