It’s not long into The Bluff that Priyanka Chopra Jonas is drenched in blood, although a lot of that blood isn’t her own, with her having dispatched a couple of pirates who raided her home looking for stolen gold. You might not have expected a few minutes earlier that she was going to turn out to be a lethal fighting machine, although really we probably did expect it, just given the way movies are these days.
It's the 19th century in the Cayman Islands, and Jonas’s character, Ercell, lives with her disabled son and her sister-in-law in a small house in paradise, or what used to be paradise, before Karl Urban and his band of pirates come ashore looking for Ercell and that missing gold. These pirates have kidnapped Ercell’s husband on the high seas, which has led them to the island, but it’s not just coincidence—they were after Ercell all along, because she has a dark secret. She used to be a pirate, too, that’s her secret. And she was pretty good at murdering, which it turns out is a skill that hasn’t left her.
What follows is sort of a revenge thriller, or maybe a counter-revenge thriller, given both sides seem to be looking to settle scores, and most of it is exceedingly violent, some of it even too much for me. But it’s well made enough that it’s also tense and good, bloody fun, if this is your idea of fun, as Ercell figures out ways to murder the guys who are trying to murder her, and Jonas and Urban are both suitably intense in their roles, though not as intense as the stone face of the New Zealand actor Temuera Morrison, who shows up in a wholly unnecessary role, but who I’m always happy to see.
I do wish there were more artistry to it all. The editing of the action is not terribly great, as we sometimes have trouble grasping a real sense of space, although we can at least generally tell what’s going on, which is better than we get from most contemporary action movies. And there is some fun with booby traps, but it would have been nice to have more than a vague idea of what Ercell is setting up so we could feel like there’s a real payoff later, rather than random things shooting and exploding. So, yes, it could have been better, but if you want to see some pirates doing a bit of the old ultraviolence, you’re likely to be satisfied.
The Bluff is on Amazon Prime Video.
