The Bluff review: John Wick action meets Pirates Near the Caribbean

Karl Urban and Priyanka Chopra Jonas star in this gritty action-adventure feature, which feels inspired by Disney's big pirate franchise

“The golden age of piracy is over,” says Captain Connor (Karl Urban), the vengeful, crafty villain of the Prime Video pirate action movie The Bluff. This may sound like a familiar lament to fans of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which are set near the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, and repeatedly discuss pirates' waning fortunes. The Bluff takes place in 1846, nearly a century later than the most recent Pirates sequel — which means Connor is both correct, and unusually attuned to future historical designations. His pronouncement matches the movie’s opening on-screen text, which reads, intentionally or not, like a shot fired at the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise: “The era of pirates on the Caribbean Sea is dying.”

In a more flexible and less family-friendly franchise, The Bluff might have actually made a fine late-period Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. Karl Urban is particularly good casting: He seems like he could have played a supporting role in one of the Pirates sequels, especially the later-period ones without original director Gore Verbinski. But while those films still leaned heavily on the franchise’s fantasy elements, this non-sequel instead takes its influences from the R-rated likes of John Wick and Die Hard.

Indian superstar Priyanka Chopra Jonas (The Matrix Resurrections) takes the Wick-ish role of Ercell, formerly a pirate known as Bloody Mary, before she retired to a quiet family life on a small Caribbean island. There, she tends to her disabled son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo) and her sister-in-law Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green), as her husband T.H. (Ismael Cruz Córdova) takes work off the island. At sea, T.H. is intercepted by Connor and his quartermaster Lee (Temuera Morrison, the Star Wars movies’ Boba and Jango Fett), who are seeking a cache of gold coins Bloody Mary stole. Eventually, this brings them to Ercell’s doorstep. Forced into a Die Hard-style tight spot, she reacts with Wickian ferocity, taking down scores of anonymous henchmen.

This means that in spite of its pirate characters, The Bluff is not a seafaring adventure; production shooting on the water is notoriously expensive, after all. This is more like Pirates Near the Caribbean. Even the film’s attempts at proximity to the sea are sometimes visually sketchy; the fakest-looking sequence in this otherwise fairly handsome production involves a climactic swordfight atop the titular bluff, with the sea unconvincingly green-screened into the background.

Most of the action in The Bluff is more impressive. Director Frank E. Flowers — who actually hails from the Caribbean, born in the Cayman Islands! — prioritizes bloody, multi-weapon scrapping over swashbuckling swordplay, and doesn’t over-cut his action to accommodate the closer quarters. While the film’s story threatens to bog down in loved-one endangerment and grim vows of revenge, the nastiness of its various stabbings, slashings, and shootings distinguishes The Bluff from its pirate predecessors.

What’s missing is a greater sense of purpose, whether that would be high-flying adventure or a stronger sense of elegiac loneliness in the lives of post-peak pirates. Instead, the filmmakers can’t resist turning Ercell into a highly contemporary (and very actor-flattering) noble badass, one who can dispatch plenty of bad guys with quick-thinking agility, and gets righteously feral whenever her family is threatened. Though a handful of barely-there flashbacks attempt to shoehorn in some tender romance between Ercella and T.H., romantic relationships (or any relationships outside the purview of “fiercely protective mother”) aren’t really the subject of this movie, any more than they are in most Marvel pictures.

Romance doesn’t have to be front and center in The Bluff, or any other pirate movie; there’s no rule that they require a minimum amount of Will-and-Elizabeth-style swooning, or for that matter, Jack Sparrow-style japery. But the relentless focus on a mother defending her homestead makes a lot of the pirate garb feel like window dressing. At its lean and efficient best, the movie feels sort of like a pirate take on a violent Western. As its most generic, it feels like any other limited-location action thriller, especially when the action relocates from the sun-dappled beaches to the dim tunnels beneath the bluffs.

It’s too bad, because purely as an action hero, Priyanka Chopra Jonas acquits herself well, while Urban and Morrison make fine antagonists — not necessarily villains, despite their ruthless misdeeds, because both actors have a gift for making pulpy material seem more grounded than it really is. Maybe these villains could both still pop up in a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel (or ripoff) — one that places a little more emphasis on characters whose swaggering pirate panache must be redirected toward a desperate fight for survival. The Bluff gestures at some of those ideas before offering warrior-mom clichés and a momentary good time.

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The Bluff is streaming on Amazon Video now.