The Bluff Review

At a time when the era of pirates is coming to an end, a tiny Caribbean island is rocked by the arrival of Captain Francisco Connor (Karl Urban) and his crew. Forcing one of the residents, Ercel (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), to reveal her bloodied past to her family. For she wasn’t always a fish wife. But will her old ways be enough to protect her family and the home she loves from those she once left behind?

Like so many genres of movies, those involving pirates have pretty much fallen out of fashion. Yes, you’ve got Pirates of the Caribbean, but those movies seem to be the exception. Although, at this point even they may have worn out their welcome. Which brings us to The Bluff. Like many movies and TV shows of the streaming era, The Bluff is likely to land with all the impact of a handful of raindrops on an ocean, and it won’t take you long to see why. It is moderately entertaining, but far from compelling, and you are likely to forget about it pretty much as soon as you’ve finished watching it. This would also explain the lack of fanfare at its arrival – I had heard nothing about this film until I saw photos from the premiere on social media, the day before it was unceremoniously dropped on Amazon Prime Video.

That said, it did get a premiere, which is more than can be said about a lot of direct-to-streaming movies. So someone must be happy with it. Just not cinematic release levels of happy. Which, to be fair, is fair. How many times have you heard someone say they enjoyed a film, but they’re glad they didn’t have to go to the cinema to see it? Well, The Bluff is one of those movies. This is the kind of revenge – “Oh no! My past has come back to haunt me!” – thriller you’ve seen many times before, and this one is unlikely to grab you in the way that it should. You’d even be forgiven for thinking there might be some kind of double meaning hidden in the title, but there isn’t. In fact, the only thing that sets this movie apart is that it involves pirates. All of whom prove to be annoyingly paper thin. Even our former pirate heroine is a tad bland. Not that any of this is the fault of the cast, all of whom bring solid performances. It’s just that they are given little to work with. Although the less said about some of the accents, the better.

Whereas Karl Urban at least gets to pontificate in a way only a scenery-chewing villain can, Priyanka Chopra Jonas can do almost nothing – and she certainly tries – to elevate Ercel beyond generic reluctant hero. Urban even gets a fun rapport with Morrison’s ‘Quartermaster Lee’. That is, until the Quartermaster falls foul of some of those pesky tropes that feature prominently in movies such as this. Not that the movie ever really does anything with the pair. But one thing the movie does do pretty well is the action. Something Chopra Jonas commits to with gusto. And it’s a good thing she does, as seeing her – and her co-stars – in the middle of all these perfectly gory and well choreographed fight scenes does add some excitement to proceedings. A fight scene that sees a hanging turned on the hangman is enjoyably inventive, and intense. So while the story is unlikely to grab audiences too tightly, they might just have some fun with all the swashbuckling. Although, for a pirate movie, there is a decided lack of boating.