The Gardener (2021)

This is it, we're finally covering The Gardiner on here, and finally getting Gary Daniels into the 60 Club with Dolph--who's technically in the 70 Club, but who's counting? In addition to us, The guys at Comeuppance and Todd Gaines at Bulletproof have covered this too.

The Gardener has the Bronson-faced Robert Bronzi as our eponymous hero, tending the garden for a rich family of Brits pretending to be Americans while living in England--at least that's the best explanation for why the family are all UK actors playing Americans while living in the UK. Anyway, at the same time Gary Daniels plays Volker, a baddie who runs a crew of guys who steal things from people's homes. After a recent break-in turns into a home invasion and double homicide, Volker wants this job done right. But when the daughter of the family decides to join her boyfriend during the holiday instead of travel with her family, they cancel their trip, leaving them ripe for these baddies when they break-in. Unfortunately for the baddies though, as their home invasion unfolds, the Gardiner has other plans for them.

What is there to say about this one? It's a home invasion movie that tries to pad out the home invasion by taking its time to get there, and does a decent job of it. Then they use the Three Stooges "there's a man in a gorilla suit taking everyone out in a mansion" paradigm, only here Bronzi as said guy in a gorilla suit--sans gorilla suit unfortunately, because that would've made this movie a ten!--is killing everyone, instead of tying them up and putting them in a closet for laughs. My one complaint would be that I'd like more Daniels, but when you see Bronzi's fighting, you realize pairing him with Daniels wouldn't work if they did it too much, so they have to save it for the end. I guess that's a good way to mitigate it. There were also weird decisions, like setting the film in the UK, and using all UK actors, but having the actors playing the family members play them as Americans. Why would you need to do that? Let everyone be Brits, that's my motto.

We finally got Daniels to the 60 Club, but we made it a year late, because he's now 61, which means Dolph remains the only actor on the site to have more films than his age. And a big reason for that was how hard this was to get on a free streamer. I guess I could've paid for it, but I got the sense from the trailer that this wasn't worth rental money, and I was right about that, this is more a good value for a free streamer or a streaming service you're already subscribed to. The thing is, he's had two films released since this one, Bring Him Back Dead and Repeater, which are both on Tubi, and it feels like this film was made for Tubi, but how can you know in the current streaming climate--though to be fair, this was on Tubi for like a week, then mysteriously was removed. After that it was on Prime for like two weeks, and then too was mysteriously removed, only to be as mysteriously restored, and I figured at that point I couldn't mess around. As far as a Daniels film goes, I think this is around the middle of his movies. It could've been worse, but we've also seen better from him. What I liked was how present he was. At this stage of his career he could start mailing in small cameos like his fellow stars, but he's not doing that, and I think I appreciate that in this film more than anything.

We're finally getting a Robert Bronzi film on the site, and it took Daniels to get us there. He really does look a lot like Bronson, and while he really isn't Bronson the way we understand Bronson with his screen presence, he does a good enough job here giving you Bronson-enough, if that makes sense? Like he's not just a look-alike, he's trying to channel him, which works enough in a movie like this that can use that kind of energy. I wouldn't want to see him in something like a remake of Death Wish--or hell even Death Wish V--but in the same way that Tito Ortiz can give you a cheap Vin Diesel, or Gruner or Bernhardt can approximate Van Damme, Bronzi works enough to punch up a DTV on-the-cheap UK production, which when you add in a name like Daniels, it can get you to the church on time. Speaking of Ortiz, it looks like he has a film with him coming up, which should be fun. Why not just do a whole Expendables movie with clones? I think there's a market for that--which is probably just us, but we're enough of a market... I think.

The only other name in this I recognized was Sarah T. Cohen, but I couldn't figure out from what, and when I looked her up on IMDb, I hadn't seen any of her films. Then I realized, she had been in films that starred, or were directed by or written by, people who were in films I'd reviewed. For example, she's done a few films written by friend of the site and podcast guest Tom Jolliffe. A lot of the films he does as more of a gun for hire like that are shot in the UK but made for American audiences, so all of the cast need to pull out their best American accents, like Cohen and the other family members do in this. She's had to play Americans so much that on her IMDb page she has an American accent demo reel. I guess it makes sense if the movie is marketed to Americans, but something like this that's more international, and actually set in England, I don't really get it--unless for Cohen and the other actors playing family members, a selling point was adding another clip to their American accent demo reel. "Hey, we can't pay you a lot for this, but we'll make the family Americans so you can further show the world how great your American accent is!" "My agent's telling me to take, fine."

Finally, this might be it for Daniels for a while, because after this film we have two Christian movies, a few foreign films, a 3-hour Bruce Lee biopic, and some film called A Stranger in Paradise that I can't seem to find. If you add all that up, if I were do do them all, that's only seven films--and I don't know how much any of them outside of A Stranger in Paradise I want to review--meaning he can't catch Dolph's 70. On the other hand, Art Camacho is at 52, and he probably has enough work out there to catch Daniels, but the next actor after him is Rothrock at 43, and I don't know that she has 17 films that haven't been reviewed in order to catch Daniels, so he's safe at two. Going into making the DTVC, I would've expected Dolph to have the most films, but I had no idea Daniels would not only be the second-most, but the second-most by an unreachable margin. 60 films is a big deal, and deserves its due. Here's to you Mr. Daniels, you're one of the greatest to ever do it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can get this on Prime, but that can change really quickly, as we've seen over the past couple years. It's worth it as a Daniels film on a free streamer, or a streaming service you already have, but I don't know if you need to rent it.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11217036

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