I’ve kinda gotten behind on my Robert Bronzi flicks.
If you don’t know who he is, he’s the 21st century Hungarian incarnation of Charles Bronson whose genre-flick career has taken off because he bears an uncanny resemblance to the Drive-In Hall-of-Famer. Bronson, for those of you who haven’t read Joe Bob’s old columns or gotten around to plumbing the depths of 1970s and 1980s vigilante flicks, was in the original Death Wish in 1974, its four sequels and a number of offshoots where it was basically a Death Wish movie, but they switched things up to have him fight serial killers, war criminals and drug dealers instead of him avenging his family, former war buddy or dog-sitter because they were criminally attacked as was the norm in the Death Wish flicks.
Bronson’s historical drive-in influence was such that not only did he help to popularize the urban vigilante genre, he basically became a whole genre unto himself as well.
And Bronzi, who according to his biography was out in Europe working as a professional horse-trainer and acting in cowboy shows, looks so much like Charles Bronson that movie producers have lined up to make flicks with all the elements of the 1980s Bronson movies but updated for a new era for Bronzi to star in.
I’ve checked out two of them, with Cry Havoc being the best one so far because not only does Bronzi get to fistfight with a hulking maniac killer in a mask who wraps himself in barbed wire for fun before ripping off his victims’ blouses, but he also gets a chance to drive a muscle car and shoot a bunch of paramilitary doofuses in the face to the point where Bronzi kills more people in the flick than the actual serial killer villain.
The other flick, Death Kiss, tried to be an angel-of-vengeance type flick where Bronzi helps out a single mom and her kid get out from underneath a criminal’s persecution but to be honest, they didn’t get the dubbing quite right.
So in The Gardener, Bronzi is Peter, a vegetarian veteran of an undetermined war who peacefully tends the yard for this family on a sprawling English manor, setting up Christmas lights and offering calm counsel to the older teenage son while being a foil to the family housekeeper.
Meanwhile, the family is in a period of domestic instability. The dad’s business is in dire straits and the financial woes are seeping into all the relationships among the mom, dad, daughter and son. On the likability scale, it’d go son, mom and daughter (a tie) and then the dad coming in at zero before plunging into the negative digits once the plot twist is revealed.
Making things worse, a gang that was involved in the prologue murder of this pregnant woman and her husband has a habit of invading homes while waving guns, cussing a lot and wearing skull masks. They happen to be casing their home with some illegal intent.
Fortunately, the family has Bronzi on their side.
Best Example of How Not to Run a Household: Dad Stephen (Richard Kovacs), who eventually earns a request for a divorce from his wife, tells her, “It doesn’t matter, the kids are almost gone anyway. I am the man of the house. This is my decision.” He was mad about a proposed day trip to a nearby city and blew up over dinner or something.
Best Blowoff: Francesca (Kate Sandison), the sassy housekeeper, when asked to assist Peter with the holiday lights, rudely replies, “I don’t work in the yard.”
Best Villain: Volker, the head bad guy with sideburns and tattoos (veteran martial arts flick actor Gary Daniels), does tai chi with his shirt off while sinister music plays and asks his minions, “Do you know what the word samurai means?” Then he gives a lecture on how he expects undying loyalty from his gang members and needs to balance karma by breaking the necks of the guys who botched the home invasion that happens in the flick’s prologue.
Best Home Defense System: Bronzi lures one guy out to the yard by starting a lawnmower, then shoves the guy’s hand under the mower and then makes him impale himself with a busted shovel handle. He also sets up a trigger wire in his greenhouse so a staple gun shoots into this guy’s ankle, then boxes Mischa, this Russian-sounding woman who likes to show off her abs, snips a guy’s Achilles tendon with hand clippers and then kills another guy with another pair of hand clippers by impaling him in the stomach.
A couple of the fight scenes are a bit ponderous and the same mistake has been made in two of the Bronzi-featured flicks I’ve seen. If you’re going to do a Charles Bronson-type action flick homage, then you absolutely cannot have the main hero spend more than a minute taking care of the minor henchpeople. It’s the pro-wrestling principle that the major person getting the push gets to have a few squash matches in the buildup to the main feud. If you’re going to have a hero and go full 1980s style, you didn’t see Sly Rocky Rambo, Chuck Norris or Arnold the Barbarian take more than five-10 seconds to vanquish an extra.
Two stars.
Check it out on Apple TV and elsewhere or grab it on physical media.