Summary
The Bluff boasts a couple of half-decent action set-pieces and a surprising mean streak, but the dialogue is woeful and the characters are paper-thin.
I’m ordinarily the first person to forgive a good action movie for all kinds of sins, just so long as it delivers where it counts. After all, even John Wick isn’t going to win any awards for its acting or scriptwriting. But The Bluff tested this idea to its limits. The bloodthirsty buccaneering actioner from Frank E. Flowers boasts a half-decent set-piece or two, some of which would be worth the price of admission alone – especially since the price of admission, given it’s streaming on Prime Video, is basically nothing – if it weren’t for woeful dialogue, half-hearted performances, and little reason to care about any of it. At least John Wick had the puppy.
The setting is nice. We’re on the Caribbean island of Cayman Brac, but there’s no Jack Sparrow in sight. Instead, our lead is Ercell (Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Heads of State), a former pirate of some renown who has carved out a nice, secretive little life for herself, her husband T.H. Bodden (Ismael Cruz Cordova, The Pickup), and their clueless kids, Issac (Vedanten Naidoo, Mythic Quest) and Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green).
This is 1846, and the heyday of pirates plaguing the seas has largely waned, but some, notably the vicious Captain Connor (Karl Urban, The Boys) and his quartermaster, Lee (Temuera Morrison, The Wrecking Crew), didn’t get that memo. After sacking Bodden’s ship and taking him hostage, these two set about Cayman Brac itself to retrieve a hefty hidden stash of gold and, in Connor’s case, cash in on the bounty of his one-time partner, “Bloody Mary”.
There isn’t a great deal wrong with this, at least on paper. It’s a serviceable framework for a period action movie that, rather novelly, plays out more like a home-invasion thriller than a swashbuckling adventure (what it reminded me of most, weirdly enough, was Rambo: Last Blood). One or two of the action beats – particularly a showy oner early on and a duel towards the very end – are serviceable, but don’t quite excel enough to distract from how little else the movie offers. It’s that weird middle-ground kind of action that’s a bit better than you probably expected, but not good enough that anyone would bother to post the clips on YouTube.
While I’m feeling charitable, I did enjoy some of the more location-specific details (there’s a nasty conch shell murder, which I can fairly confidently say was a new one for me), and obvious effort – not to mention money – has been spent on making the whole production look the part, even if some locations are very obviously sets. Fair play to the actors, too, who have evidently performed most of the stunts themselves. Chopra Jonas has made a recent career out of being an action hero, and The Bluff is a serviceable feather in her cap.
But that’s all it is, to be clear. Ercell isn’t a character beyond being a protective mother with a penchant for violence; the real implications of her notorious past are never grappled with, and she communicates almost exclusively in overwritten badass one-liners that really start to grate after a while. I had a big problem with the dialogue in this movie in general, and there are a few sequences of back-and-forth patter or – even worse – flamboyant monologuing that are really awkward. And for some reason, it often seems like Chopra isn’t even physically present in the scene, like her stuff was recorded separately and stitched together in the editing bay.
Urban doesn’t fare much better. He’s good for a snarl and a couple of stretches of villainy, but he, again, has no depth beyond just being a bad guy. I like both of these two generally, so it’s weird I liked both of them so little in this, but I think it’s a writing problem again. The movie is in such a rush to have them spout mouthfuls of rubbish at each other – defiant bluster for her; sinister, threatening taunts for him – that they never really have time to emote. And that “physically present” thing really undermines a number of the scenes they share together, including a very key one where the camera doesn’t hit the reverse shot fast enough for Ercell’s counter line, so it comes in from off-screen over what Connor is saying. Just an observation, but it only seems to be Prime Video movies that sometimes can’t even hang together in terms of their basic underlying construction.
I don’t want to be too harsh on The Bluff, since it does come alive a couple of times, and there are definitely worse ways to wile away an afternoon. It just feels like a movie that’s a little too ambitious action-wise, and a lot too inattentive narrative-wise, so you notice all the worst bits more than you otherwise might. The climax suggests a sequel, so if that happens, maybe the filmmakers can take more of a run-up and do something a bit more daring with the idea. But I won’t hold my breath.
