Cert – 15, Run-time – 1 hour 43 minutes, Director – Frank E Flowers
Ercell’s (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) pirating past is long behind her, however when bloodthirsty Captain Connor (Karl Urban) kidnaps her husband (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and goes in search of her, she must protect her family from attack.
The pirate movie is something of a rarity these days, perhaps now more than ever. Amazon have chosen to bury their crack at the sub-genre, produced by the Russo brothers, directly on Amazon Prime rather than giving a cinema release. It seems something of a wise decision from them as a cinema release may well have led to a Cutthroat Island level impact for pirate flicks, although at least after that we got Muppet Treasure Island.
What The Muppets provided that The Bluff doesn’t is a sense of fun. Entertainment and slight thrills (let’s not forget Kermit The Frog’s sword fight with Tim Curry). This heavy-on-the-blood actioner is a bland trudge from start to finish as Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s Ercell, once nicknamed ‘Bloody Mary’, finds her quiet Caribbean island life turned upside down when old mentor Captain Connor (Karl Urban, boasting one of the most uneven accents for quite some time, ticking off almost every British county along the way) kidnaps her husband (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and attempts to track her down. Constantly fleeing through the island’s terrain a revenge-chase flick plays out while Ercell tries to protect her family.
Director Frank E Flowers and Joe Ballarini’s screenplay cycles through the same set ups of Connor commanding his crew to hunt down Ercell while she finds herself getting more into her old ways and reassuring her family that everything will be fine, whilst still looking worried. For 103-minutes much of what we see plays out along these overstretched, repeating lines, trying to push action that appears to lean into its bloodiness to compensate for the fact that it’s just not very interesting. We’ve seen this film done before, and better, and it simply feels difficult to engage with anything that’s happening on-screen with just how damp it all feels.
The plot is undoubtedly simplistic, and that’s not in itself an issue. It’s fine to have a simple revenge narrative play out, but the problem with The Bluff’s is that it feels like a cardboard cut-out, and at times looks like it was filmed against one too – an insistence on seemingly lighting a number of scenes with one giant spotlight provides some unappealing shots. Style is what the film truly lacks, the formulaic nature is highlighted by the fact that it plays things so safely and even more blandly in the wake of this. Dull from start to finish, it’s one of the most trying films in terms of pure boredom that I’ve seen for quite some time. Not even Karl Urban’s fluctuating accent is down to joyously hamming it up like Tim Curry.
A cardboard cut-out revenge flick with no real style, The Bluff is a bland, repetitive trudge from start to finish. Calling back to the kind of pirate movies that led to a pause in the sub-genre before.
Just A Little Bit Random 