If you think about it, 1846 was an eventful year. That’s when we discovered the planet Neptune. That’s when the saxophone got patented. That’s the year the Donner Party ran into their wee spot of bother. The Liberty Bell got cracked (whoops!), and the Mexican-American War broke out (dang it). The Associated Press was also founded in 1846, so if you see any of those AP folks, tell them TheWrap said “Happy 180th Anniversary!”
Yes, a whole lot of interesting things happened in 1846. The events of the new Prime Video original movie “The Bluff” do not rank highly among them. Frank E. Flowers directed and co-wrote this modest swashbuckler, starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas as an ex-pirate who springs into action when her arch-nemesis lays siege to her island home, kidnapping her husband and threatening her kids. It’s a competent, yet generic action thriller, but will probably appeal to anyone left high and dry after “Black Sails” got canceled in 2017. Which was nine years ago, a time which feels so far away now it might as well have been 1846.
The action begins at sea, where the villainous Captain Connor (Karl Urban) hijacks a vessel that’s captained by the heroic T.H. Bodden (Ismael Cruz Córdova). The action then shifts back to land for the rest of the movie, presumably because that’s a heck of a lot easier and cheaper. Those pirates are on the hunt for whoever stole their gold and, thanks to Bodden, they’ve tracked the culprit down to a tiny island in the Caribbean, inhabited by saintly citizens and a couple former pirates.
Priyanka Chopra plays one of those ex-pirates: Ercell, Bodden’s wife, who has to protect her disabled son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo) and her sister-in-law Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green) from Connor’s small army of scurvy dogs. At least I think it’s a small army. It might be a huge one. Chopra kills dozens of bad guys over the course of “The Bluff” but Connor never runs out of fresh cannon fodder. Do pirates have understudies? (Besides the “Pirates of Penzance,” I mean.)
There’s not much more to “The Bluff,” a title which refers to an actual, geographical bluff that’s decked out in booby traps and explosives. You might think the name would have a double-meaning, and that the hero would need to resort to fakery to save her family from these accursed pillagers and plunderers. But alas, we’re not here watch pirates be smart. We’re here to watch pirates kick each other’s booties.
“The Bluff” is a series of competent action set pieces where Priyanka Chopra beats people up, blows people up and feeds them to crocodiles. That’s a fun thing to be, but the lack of ambition is still a problem. It’s not that “The Mizzenmast and the Furious” could have been profound. Nobody was asking for profound. It’s just that “competent” is a low bar as far as action sequences are concerned.
Chopra proves her fisticuffing prowess — she’s convincing with a rapier and a flintlock and a right hook. But after an early life-or-death beatdown, the rest of the film pulls most of its punches, and the action choreography and camerawork cease to dazzle. Sometimes it looks like Frank E. Flowers is about to unveil an awesome one-take wonder full of impressive fight moves and explosions. But then the movie abandons that promise and delivers, instead, a generic series of beat downs. It’s efficient but unremarkable, and as such it never fully compensates for “The Bluff’s” other mediocrities.
Also, since most of the action takes place on dry land, and since there aren’t nearly enough crocodiles, “The Bluff” stops feeling like a pirate movie after a while. If you changed the costumes, updated the slang and replaced the stolen gold with any other Macguffin, there would be little that differentiates “The Bluff” from any other middle-of-the-road action movie in which a hero stops bad guys from doing stuff. I know that I sound like I’m saying “Airplane!” wouldn’t be funny without the jokes, but the difference is the jokes in “Airplane!” are brilliant, so you wouldn’t want to lose them. Meanwhile, the pirate stuff in “The Bluff” is okay at best, so you could take it or leave it.
“The Bluff” isn’t a bad pirate movie. If anything, it has so little competition these days that it’s probably “the best pirate movie in years” by default. But that’s damning the film with faint praise, or possibly praising it with faint damnation. Either way, “The Bluff” is made for pirate movie fans, who are likely to forgive the film’s flaws in exchange for 101 minutes of scraggly, well-intentioned, albeit mediocre, pirate thrills.
The Best Action Movies of 2025