The Gardener

The Gardener (Le Jardinier) is a 2025 French action comedy directed by David Charhon, written by Sébastien Fechner and Vincent De Brus, and released by Amazon MGM Studios on Prime Video on 10 January 2025. Its premise is a piece of pure political black humour: every year, the Prime Minister quietly draws up a list of inconvenient people — troublemakers of every kind — to be eliminated in the name of raison d'État.

Serge Shuster (Michaël Youn), a senior civil servant close to the Presidency, discovers through a machination he never saw coming that his own name has appeared on that list. The rules are brutally simple: once you are on it, an elite team of state killers has forty-eight hours to close the file. Serge is not a spy, not a fighter and not especially brave — he is a bureaucrat with a wife, children and a comfortable house, suddenly holding a state secret that makes his entire family collateral.

With nowhere to run and no institution left to trust, the Shusters fall back on the only person on the property who does not seem frightened: Léo (Jean-Claude Van Damme), their strange, taciturn gardener. The film turns the family home into a battleground, staging a siege-style action comedy in which Van Damme plays knowingly with his own late-career screen image while Youn supplies escalating panic. It is broad, loud and unabashedly old-school in its action pedigree.

Beneath the slapstick, The Gardener is a farce about the invisibility of the people who actually keep things alive. The state in this film is an efficient machine that maintains itself the way a landscaper maintains a lawn — by periodically cutting back whatever grows out of line. The joke Charhon builds the film on is that the man with the shears is also the only moral agent in the story.

The film's message is deliberately unsubtle: power treats human beings as maintenance work, and the comfortable functionary who administers that system is safe only until the list turns toward him. Serge's terror is the film's satire in miniature — he does not object to the machine on principle, he objects to being inside it.

There is also a second, more personal statement running through the casting itself. By handing the role of the humble, underestimated gardener to Jean-Claude Van Damme — and by openly joking about his age — the film argues that competence and dignity outlast spectacle. Reviewers noted the film is fully aware that its star is no longer young, and it converts that awareness into its own subject: the old craftsman still knows exactly where to cut.

As straight-faced political satire. One reading takes the list seriously: the film is about a state that has normalised assassination as budgetary housekeeping, and the comedy is a delivery mechanism for genuine cynicism about French executive power. On this view, Serge's panic is the point — the system only becomes visible to those it consumes.

The Gardener sits at the intersection of two currents in mid-2020s French cinema. The first is the streaming-first French genre film: Amazon bought the picture for France and put it out on Prime Video on 10 January 2025, bypassing theatrical release entirely — part of a broader shift in which globally distributed platforms have become the primary financiers and shop windows for mid-budget French action.

The second is the late-career reinvention of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Since JCVD and Jean-Claude Van Johnson, Van Damme's most interesting work has involved playing versions of his own myth, and this film continues that lineage by casting him as a man whose extraordinary abilities are hidden inside a menial job. RogerEbert.com's Simon Abrams framed his 2/4 review precisely around this tension, arguing the film shows Van Damme still hasn't found the formula for giving audiences what they want while also showing range.

Culturally, the film's satire is specifically French: raison d'État is a phrase with real weight in a country whose political history includes genuine state scandals, and the joke of a Prime Minister with an annual clean-up list lands as caricature of a recognisable anxiety about opaque executive power. Its wider influence on cinema has so far been negligible — it was received as disposable platform entertainment rather than as a work with a legacy — but it stands as a data point in how algorithms and streamers now shape the French comedy-action hybrid.

Reception was mixed to negative, with a clear split between genre-friendly and mainstream critics. The film holds a low user rating on IMDb (around 4.2/10), and French reviewers were the harshest: one dismissal called it flatly unwatchable and 'the biggest turkey of the year.'

What was praised: Van Damme's residual screen charisma and Michaël Youn's willingness to commit completely to the absurdity of his character. Reviewers who enjoyed the film described it as goofy but fun — a home-invasion actioner that entertains in spite of itself. Film Threat's Alan Ng gave it 6/10, calling it a ridiculous blend of political thriller and action comedy that somehow manages to entertain despite its many flaws.

Main criticisms: the action was widely described as lacking weight, with the film reaching for old-school genre thrills but never quite taking off. The tone was the other recurring complaint — an inconsistent register that swings between political conspiracy and broad slapstick. Simon Abrams at RogerEbert.com awarded 2/4, concluding that Van Damme still hasn't worked out how to satisfy his audience and display range at the same time. The most negative appraisals called it unpleasant, unfunny, awkward and loud, and one outlet framed it as a career low for its star.

The controversial element is the humour aimed at Van Damme's age: viewers who read it as affectionate self-parody enjoyed the film most, while those who read it as the film undercutting its own hero found the whole enterprise misjudged.

Verdict: a disposable but not joyless platform action comedy — better received by audiences who came for Van Damme than by critics who came for a movie.