Need a closeup picture of the shrubs for ID to determine if they can handle a hard pruning and rejuvenation. The risks of the truck pull method are dependent on where all the various utilities enter your house and in this case the nature of the short wall of the bed on the left.

would it be safe to use the truck and chain pull method?

==>>> perhaps the only thing of value that i see there.. for the future.. is the brick wall ... i would not threaten its survival with a truck and chain ... if in fact that is what it is.. bit of a focus issue ...

short and sweet this time...

ken

I'm in Indianapolis, IN. I was wrong about distance from house. These are 2 feet away from the foundation. I had call-before-you-dig come out before for another project and I don't recall them marking anything in the front yard, but I'll have them come out again to double check.

And while it may be true that "anything can be pruned", not everything should be pruned!! Some shrubs will never recover well from a hard prune and will look like cr*p endlessly going forward. To determine if the OP's shrubs are up for this treatment or should just be removed and replaced, we need to confirm an ID, so close up photos please.

And I wouldn't be in any big hurry to remove the tree to the left either. It is not clear from the photo how closely it is planted - and some here have an unnatural fear of any trees close to structures - or what kind of tree it is so any removal speculation now from just a distant photo is premature.

They are Yews. Hack away to a foot smaller than the size you want them to be. You can even go for even size and height.

Yews can be pruned to any height from the ground and recover.

Yeah, those are really nice yews that will happily regrow from any hacking you give it. I'd leave some greenery, of course. :-)

They look best if you reshape them as they grow if you gave them a real hacking. If you only trimmed, they'll usually hold their shape pretty well on their own.

Keep in mind, yew can grow up to about a foot per year (give or take a lot depending on conditions), which isn't super-fast, so don't hack them back too far or the area might look really bare for a while.