When her tranquil life on a remote island is shattered by the return of her vengeful former captain, a skilled ex-pirate must confront her bloody past and unleash her deadly talents to save her fam...
Ahhh, pirate movies—swashbuckling rogues with gold teeth and weathered faces, their cutlasses flashing in Caribbean sunlight as they swing from creaking rigs onto treasure-laden decks, all while the azure sea churns beneath hulls of dark, salt-worn wood…and it’s a genre that Hollywood has seemed to have fallen out of love with. For every Pirates of the Caribbean and Black Sails, there’s a Cutthroat Island and….Roman Polanski’s “Pirates”.
“The Bluff” is, both luckily and unluckily, somewhere in the middle.
Frank E. Flowers’ direction can best be described as simple but effective. His workmanlike precision reveals a very lean and efficient understanding of the who, what and how but as far as being genre savvy with this particular genre, the result feels docked rather than anchored. He treats the pirate myth like a cracked reliquary—pries it open, sniffs the dust, decides the relic inside is probably fake, but films it anyway with a handheld that never quite finds the horizon.
One automatic must for swashbuckling adventures such as this is that they don’t mesh well when filmed on a soundstage as opposed to on location, something I’m glad Philip Ivey‘s production design at least tried to take into account. Setting the general filming location on the Gold Coast of Queensland, Australia gave them as much flexibility with the free space to dig around with as possible, and the vast majority of coastal locations and island sets are visually appealing, anchoring enough maritime atmosphere to help with sparsely peppered location-and-period-specific details. The illusion holds magnificently…..right up until it breaks the spell. Putting aside the almost casual retreat to more artificial environments and green screens (it gets particularly shoddy whenever we’re near the sea), there’s a shocking over-reliance on said digital backgrounds in the later half that gives certain plasticity to what feels like a stage-like approach.
Overproduced and underdeveloped, it’s a presentation that maybe you can get away with saying is meant to feel theatrical, heavily channeling the spirit of early 1900s pirate plays and silent films with many of their exaggerated aesthetics and stylized pantomime. On that front, that glossy veneer is matched in full by how the film looks. The cinematography by Greg Baldi is easily the best thing the film has going for it; doesn’t quite treat piracy like a theme park ride but between the natural lighting, color palette pushed between candied and undersaturated and mostly dynamic fluidity with the shots, the camerawork keeps its appreciable commitment to grab at your attention.
Editing helps carry that momentum to a reasonable distance without its legs out underneath it.
Pacing overall is very brisk with a steady rhythm that never drags or rushes, maintaining a faint sense of momentum like a well-trimmed galleon catching the trade winds and the lean 101 minute runtime ensures the film never overstays its welcome. Most of the visual effects and CGI look ripped straight out of the SyFy channel, tension goes so many peaks and valleys that what should be white-knuckle moments of peril feel more like gentle swells on a calm sea by the third act, and I can’t quite put my finger on it but the tone…..it feels muted, sanitized, diluted with seawater to the point where even the most dramatic moments land with all the impact of a whispered threat in an empty tavern.
Henry Jackman’s score has a lot of pomp, zest and bombastic brass, alternating between minimalist and standard extravagant pirate-fare despite the compositions never quite reaching the iconic memorability of Zimmer's work for the genre, the sound design is so close to being masterful, somehow more graphic than the sword wounds, pistol blasts, and cannon explosions that are actually shown onscreen, Antoinette Messam’s costume design is mostly period accurate with some slight furbishes and for what its worth, the action sequences get the job done. None of the action has to overextend or sell itself short to accommodate for close quarters since the staging is ripped from the DNA of John Wick but not all of them are convincing; there’s a single-take home invasion sequence that tries a bit too hard to feel flashy and bombast and it’s fairly obvious where the inspiration comes from (its also a testament to how unfocused much of the action here is). Still, for what they were designed to do, I can’t knock too much against them.
And it should go without saying, but the R-rating was an easy win here that the film achieves.
Competent is all that comes to mind regarding the acting; no one embarrasses themselves, but neither does anyone truly command the screen with the swaggering charisma or haunted intensity that the best pirate tales demand. For every blunt dialogue exchange deliberately over-explaining everything, the rest do carry some whistle-worthy value but that can only do so much to give many of these characters much dimension or personality beyond the specific roles they have to carry out, alternating back and forth between elite killing machines and total idiots just to serve the plot.
Priyanka Chopra carries herself with necessary stoic determination and anguish and while I won’t pretend Karl Urban isn’t his usual extravagant, somewhat charming self, he’s more or less playing it completely straight. The rest of the supporting cast are serviceable.
Despite being built, sold and promoted on a John Wick-meets-Pirates-of-the-Carribean fusion of dubachery, violence and japery, most of what we get here carries over the modern blueprint of a violent western only with the bones of a home-invasion thriller while dressed in pirate drag like a DLC skin; think Panic Room from 2002 as a B-movie. Parts of what we see here are happy to commit to a high level of camp without winking at the material; there’s definitely a certain satisfaction to be found in the narrative’s refusal to overcomplicate itself and it does try to torque its violence into something worth biting into for the average viewer but for as straightforward as the story is, it achieves the abject bare minimum. Half-heated craftsmanship meeting half-hearted contractual obligation, it wastes no time setting up its conflicts, set-ups and pay-offs but what it sets up and pays off never earns a single coin of emotional weight despite the film’s genuine best attempts to feel mythic.
What more can I actually say here? It’s just a really thin excuse for an action flick and an even thinner one for what had the potential to be a more human, drama-oriented spin on the usual chicanery that comes with a pirate flick. Predictability is very high, for the end result is never in any doubt, the rote sequence of standoffs, betrayals, and double-crosses are so expectedly telegraphed that they might as well be read aloud before the actors speak them and nothing here holds enough proper weight or consequences or some greater sense of purpose that makes the journey feel worth it, and this is in spite of the few genuine nuggets of intrigue it digs up. Gesturing toward the operatic blood-feuds and mythic betrayals that fuel the best revenge narratives can only go so far if it never once dares to let its characters actually sit with their wounds.
I don’t know; maybe I was expecting a thorough dive into the egalitarian nature of piracy, how women, freed slaves, bastards, men who loved men, many of the kind of people who ignored or were ignored by the royalist and classist world that they escaped from looked to survive. Given this is set in a time period where not many pirates sailed the Caribbean Sea anymore, this could’ve been a fine place to hint at the elegiac loneliness in the lives of post-peak pirates who've either satisfied themselves with what they have or decided they want to leave it behind; a dying breed seeking freedom through violent means. There are certain scenes where they allude to and provide lip service to the lived-in desperation or anarchic joy that the best pirate tales conjure but that is the extent of its perfunctory practices.
There’s nothing profound or particularly ambitious about “The Bluff”, for it doesn’t set its aim too high. It’s a somewhat dated actioner that arguably misses the core spirit of a true pirate movie but then again, maybe that’s the smartest con it pulls: an entertaining amusement park ride playing out like a children's bedtime story.
