The Bluff

It takes a considerable amount of skill to make big-budget action movies — in this case, a period pirate swashbuckler — that are neither great nor terrible. How is it possible to be so safe when the scale is lavish and the stakes are high? How is it possible to be so deliberately sterile and precisely average when the resources are limitless? But one of the magic tricks of this decade has been the way streaming platforms have legitimised the middling-and-forgettable genre. Heck, it’s almost an art form. “Produced by the Russo brothers” is usually a tell, and The Bluff is another bullseye for ambient action (I vowed to get through this review without using the word “algorithmic”). The Bluff has some texture, a pinch of personality, bone-crunching violence and gore, a spirited lead even, yet I can’t remember a single moment right now. And it’s been only 8 minutes since the end credits rolled. I suppose that’s a win for the content ecosystem.

Set in 1846, at the ragged end of the pirate era in the Caribbean, The Bluff (Amazon Prime Video) pits a former pirate in hiding against a relentless hunter chasing stolen gold. Unlike most films in the genre, the action unfolds largely on dry land rather than on rolling decks and cannon-blasted ships. Piracy defines these characters’ past, but this story is about what happens when that past refuses to stay buried. On a quiet stretch of Cayman Brac, in a fishing community of white sands and shell-lined paths, the Bodden family awaits the return of Captain T.H. Bodden (Ismael Cruz Córdova). His wife, Ercell (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), keeps the household steady. Their young son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo), physically disabled but resolute, counts the days of his father’s absence. Aunt Lizzy (Safia Oakley-Green) has her own reasons for keeping an eye on the horizon. Life in this small British colony moves at an unhurried pace—until it doesn’t, because Ercell has a past she has carefully tried to outrun.

Within the first few minutes of The Bluff, Priyanka Chopra Jonas slices and dices, swoops down and slashes a bunch of buccaneers in a relentless, action-packed, adrenaline-pumping sequence. Except that her character is no ordinary damsel in distress and neither is this a regular home invasion. The men who break in aren’t your streetside thugs either. They are, in fact, tied inextricably to Ercell Bodden’s past (Priyanka) and now stand to threaten her future. For Ercell wasn’t always Ercell. Known as “Bloody Mary”, she grew up sailing the seven seas as a pirate but gave up her swashbuckling, edgy ways for a domesticated life in Cayman Brac. The invasion — in which Priyanka plunges into the blood and gore with both physical solidity and psychological grit — is just the beginning of the high-stakes action that defines this Frank E. Flowers-directed film.