Director: Frank E. Flowers
Writers: Joe Ballarini, Frank E. Flowers
Stars: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Karl Urban, Safia Oakley-Green
Synopsis: A Caribbean woman gets her secret past revealed when her island is invaded by vicious buccaneers.
The high seas of making a film with pirates aren’t easy to navigate at all. Filmmakers don’t want to make another Cutthroat Island, they want to make another Pirates of the Caribbean. The vacancy of this kind of movie has been reduced to zero with the new film, The Bluff. The Bluff stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Ercell Bodde, who is a housewife who’s awaiting the return of her husband Captain T.H. Bodden (Ismael Cruz Cordova) and his ship’s crew. The two share a son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo) and T.H. ‘s sister Lizzie (Sofia Oakley-Green). Their home, Cayman Brac, is a little slice of paradise. Locals are able to raise their kids, work, and enjoy the weather every day without interference from others that aren’t welcome. That’s until Captain Connor (Karl Urban) and his men wash ashore searching for something that’s rightfully his.
Chopra Jonas is our lead and she gives a decent performance as Ercell. She doesn’t play her character as a damsel in distress. Ercell gives it her all by fighting these unwanted visitors with guts and grit. Protecting her family is her main priority and if she has to cut men from their upper torso down to their toes, then so be it. Jonas’ background as an actress in Bollywood films has always been one of her strengths as a performer because she’s an absolute pro in action sequences. The first thing I ever saw her in was the ABC series, Quantico. My eyes were fixated on her and the way that she commanded the audience with her beauty and her performance as an action performer.
As the movie goes on, we find out that Ercell has a secret life that she had before her husband came into the picture. She lived a life of swashbuckling and crime after being forced into it as a child by Captain Connor. Connor kidnaps her husband, T.H., after he finds his gold on their ship, they sail back to Cayman Brac, and that’s where the real story begins. Ercell turned into a killer in order to survive on the high seas with Connor. During a battle with others Ercell stabbed him and took his treasure. That brings us back into the present. Chopra Jonas and Urban try to sell the confrontation between the both of them but the blandness of the script doesn’t allow for the two to give us great performances. I know Karl Urban is known for his role as Butcher on The Boys but his acting as a villain in this didn’t make me feel anything. He wasn’t intimidating, scary, or a villain with traits to be frightened by. One thing I did notice was how he was constantly rubbing some sort of drug inside of his mouth. It looked like seaweed but it gave him the energy he needed to fight everyone that wasn’t in his crew.
Pirate movies were made to be filmed on location. There’s no way that you can capture the magic of an actual island via green screen. It feels very manufactured and cheap when productions shoot beach and island scenes on a soundstage. Director Frank E. Flowers made a great decision to set principal photography in Australia because you feel the authenticity of the landscape. This was definitely a plus for me because they use the location to their advantage as much as they can. The action sequences are all heightened by the location. The cinematography from Greg Baldi was decent when there wasn’t any unnecessary cgi.
Towards the third act of the movie we’re left with predictable plot points that have been done before, supporting characters with no real development, and some effects that don’t look convincing. While I’m happy to see Priyanka give a better performance than she’s had since Quantico, I really hope that she can pull off a surprising performance in another genre. Karl Urban is just using elements of his performance as The Butcher in The Boys. At this point in his career, I hope that he’s still able to switch things up like Liam Neeson. The Bluff will give audiences a nostalgic feeling of older movies focusing on pirates. Unfortunately, the feeling fades away when they realize that decent action sequences and bad dialogue aren’t enough to push this boat to shore.
