The Bluff

The Salt and the Blood

I've always found it a bit weird how movies romanticize pirates, turning colonizers and killers into these charming rogues with parrots on their shoulders. *The Bluff*, the new hard-R actioner from director Frank E. Flowers, has no interest in that myth. Set in 1846, long after the golden age of Caribbean piracy had rotted away, the film reframes the swashbuckler as something much uglier and more terrifying: a home invasion thriller.

Truthfully? It nearly works.



Flowers, who's from the Caymans himself, clearly wants to reclaim the history of his own backyard. The sand here isn't a playground for Jack Sparrow; it’s a world where real people—like Ercell "Bloody Mary" Bodden, played with a surprising amount of raw grit by Priyanka Chopra Jonas—are just trying to survive. Ercell has traded her cutlass for coconuts, living a quiet life on Cayman Brac with her husband T.H. (Ismael Cruz Cordova). But when her old captain, the tobacco-chewing, 20-round-revolver-wielding Connor (Karl Urban), comes knocking to collect a debt, the island becomes a slaughterhouse.

I’m not totally sure the movie knows how to handle the clash between its raw, cultural roots and the slick, algorithmic vibe of its producers, the Russo brothers. You can feel Flowers fighting to make a gritty, ground-level brawler, but the Amazon MGM machine keeps trying to turn it into just another polished streaming asset.



You see that friction most clearly in the film's centerpiece: a brutal, single-take fight inside Ercell's home. Trapped, she’s forced to defend her kids from Connor's crew. Flowers and cinematographer Greg Baldi put together a fluid, continuous shot that follows the chaos from room to room. She isn't doing polished martial arts; she's pulling hair, biting hands, and in one genuinely shocking moment, caving a man's head in with a conch shell. Watch Chopra Jonas's body language—the usual red-carpet poise is gone. She moves with a heavy, desperate center of gravity. She doesn't look like an action hero; she looks like a mother who has finally snapped.

Still, the camera's slick refusal to cut sometimes drains the impact from the very violence it’s trying to capture. It’s a trick we've seen plenty of times now, and while it’s technically impressive, it occasionally makes the terror feel a bit too rehearsed. Simon Abrams over at RogerEbert.com was spot on when he called the film "a B-movie at heart despite also being over-produced and under-developed, too." He’s right; the script rarely matches the intensity of the actual choreography.



Whenever the dialogue falters, Urban is there to hold everything together. He has made a career out of playing bruised, cynical men, but his Captain Connor is a different beast entirely. He barely moves, letting his heavy, sloping shoulders and a constant, venomous scowl do all the work. He is a man who knows he belongs to a dying era, and he's determined to drag everyone down into the grave with him.

Whether *The Bluff* works for you depends on how much you're willing to overlook its contradictions. It’s a bit too glossy for its own good, and the final sword fight hits some pretty expected genre beats. But there are moments—quiet beats where the camera just stays on the sweat, the dirt, and the sheer exhaustion on Chopra Jonas's face—that feel genuinely real. I couldn't look away from those. It’s not a perfect voyage, but it finally strips the pirate myth down to the bone.