The Bluff Review

Ah the swashbuckler film. It's hard to believe it was once a common sight in theaters, bit today, not so much. The last big one was probably 2017's "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales," and be honest, do you remember even one scene from it? I know I don't.

But Amazon Prime's "The Bluff" is more "Pirates of the John Wick" than "of the Caribbean," with our heroine moving faster with guns and swords than any swashbuckler I've ever seen.

Priyanka Chopra stars as Ercell, who's husband, T.H. (played by Ismael Cruz Córdova) is at sea searching for a cure for the legs of their physically disabled son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo). She stays behind to bake him a coconut cake for his birthday (wonder if he wished for his legs to work?), alongside her sister-in-law Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green) on a quiet coast of the Cayman Brac. Lizzy, as she's called, plans to run away with a boy, but the night of, Ercell awakens to men outside her quaint house. It's, gasp, pirates! 

Little does she know, T.H.'s ship was commandeered by none other than the infamous Captain Connor, and wouldn't you know it, him and Ercell have a bit of a history. He kidnapped her at a young age and turned her into a fellow buccaneer, until one day she stabbed him in the back (er, well, chest) and took off with his money. He's been looking for her ever since, and considering his luck finally finding her, you'd think it was his birthday.

He's played by Karl Urban with a calm intensity that verges on overacting, but that's just the kind a dumb movie like this demands. He knows what kind of picture he's in, whereas everyone else takes their dialogue so seriously as if Francis Ford Coppola was behind the camera instead of Frank E. Flowers.

But back to the plot: Ercell first tries to play dumb when a few greasy men hold a sword to her, but like any modern woman, she makes quick work of them using knifes, chairs, frying pans and her bare fists. Freshly freed, she has Isaac head to light the signal fire to alert the British with Pastor Bradley (David Field), while she tries to locate Lizzy. Most of the island holds up in the local church, while the villains try to find Ercell. And the gold, wouldn't be a pirate movie if there wasn't a gold bounty.

It never explains how Ercell here knows this style of fighting, mind you: oh sure, we're told she's previously a seafaring criminal, but I must have missed the day at school where we learned pirates knew "gun fu."

The fighting is bloody and frequent, but it rarely thrills. It's also way too dark, which is especially a problem during the back-half of the runtime with a bulk of the action taking place in a murky, dingy cave. I had all my blinds down and I still struggled. And the problem wasn't my TV, it was obviously a stylistic choice- some scenes are draped in total blackness, the only light coming from the barrel of the gun. When I could see what was going on, it was fine, I guess, I just don't know why the filmmakers didn't want me to see more of it.

The "John Wick" movies, the obvious inspiration here, had almost a sense of humor to them, as if they acknowledged the inherent silliness of killing a man with a book through his mouth. But "The Bluff" fails to find such giddy pleasure with its mayhem, it's just violent to justify its "R" rating. It adds little new to the action thriller genre outside what costumes everyone wears and the occasional use of cannons.