Usually when a subgenre noisily returns from Davy Jones’ locker to hijack the box office, we tend to see copycats spring up all over the place as other studios scramble to catch up. Be it the 90s slasher resurgence in the wake of Scream, or the return of the sword and sandal epic once Gladiator did the business, you can always count on Hollywood blowing whichever way the winds take its sails. However, despite the gargantuan sized success of the Pirates Of The Carribean movies (yes, even the bad ones), there’s was a noticable lack of a resurgence unless you count the small screen pleasures of Black Sails, the comedic Our Flag Means Death Aardman’s The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists if you want to get really technical.
Hoping to address that imbalance of scurvy naves and rum soaked rapscallions is The Bluff, a full blooded pirate flick that hopes to bring some slick, modern tinged action to Amazon subscribers in a film that could very well be described as Long John Wick.
The year is 1846, and thanks to the efforts of the British Royal Navy, being a Pirate on the seven seas is now an endangered profession. This hasn’t stopped the ruthless and determined Captain Conner from continuing to ply his trade, but flanked by a small army of black-clad mercenaries, this particular pirate captain is searching for something far more personal than typical ill-gotten booty. As a result, his act to capture the merchant ship of Captain T.H. Bodden and slaughter all of his crew proves to be far more measured than your usual pirate attack.
It turns out that what Conner is really after is Bodden’s wife, Ercell, who lives a peaceful life amidst the Carribean Islands, raising their disabled son Issac, and trying to keep her dismissive sister-in-law, Elizabeth, honest as part of a colony on the idyllic Cayman Brac. However, both Conner and Bodden both know something about Ercell that her youthful charges don’t and before she was a loving wife and mother, she was something of a fiersome pirate herself who earned the name Bloody Mary after the swathe she carved with Conner through the oceans. However, after tiring of such a brutal life, she eventually turned on her volatile partner in crime, stabbed him and made off with his sizable cache of gold in order to build a new life for herself when the only guts she spilled where that of the fish she prepared for dinner.
As Conner and his men lay waste to Cayman Brac, Ercell has to dust off some of her more ferral skills if she hopes to keep her family alive and rescue her husband from the clutches of her vengeful former work colleague. Of course, you don’t earn the name Bloody Mary by being a pushover, and Conner’s men are going to discover the hard way that the real Bluff at hand is the fishwife persona that Ercell has to shed in order for her to brutally protect what’s hers.
With its female lead and its penchant for high levels of graphic violence, Frank E. Flowers’ The Bluff is less a Pirates Of The Carribean clone and more like Renny Harlin’s Cutthroat Island only with a lot more things cut, sliced and hacked than just throats. Usually the realm of swashbuckling fun, it’s actually somewhat satisfying seeing one of these types of films embrace the more modern action aspects that takes in long sequences with sparce cuts and slick, fluid fight scenes that usually ends with a bone jarring, skin splitting finishing move before our determined anti-hero moves on to her next opponent. As a result, if you’ve made it to the shore of The Bluff in order to just take in around a hundred minutes of sword-based brutality, then this Russo Brothers produced skirmish should suit you right down to the ground as you certainly get your pieces of eight’s worth when it comes to the action.
However, while the casting is fun and the bloodletting is copious, there’s a real sense that The Bluff set sail way before it’s crew was ready to sail as its sparce, action heavy plot feels less like a lean, mean pirate machine and more like the powers that be couldn’t be arsed to develop it any further and just gave it the green light on the basis of an unfinished draft. Other action movies in the past have benefited by zeroing out the ambient noise and focusing solely on the task at hand, but there’s a noticable difference between a film being efficiently lean (Predator for instance, or Mad Max 2) and a film simply being empty and The Bluff finds itself tipping into the latter numerous times. Yes, the action is swift, varied and enthusiastically savage (Ercell slaughters her foes with everything she can get her hands on, including guns, knives, hastily made mines and even, at one point, a crocodile), but Flowers doesn’t quite have the focus of a James Cameron, a Gareth Evans or a Chad Stahelski when it comes to doling out extensive and extended action and at times the near constant slicing and dicing tend to get repetitive without any real narrative meat to sink our teeth into.
However, the movie manages to stem the flow of leaking interest with a spot of interesting casting. While the majority of the cast are mostly shoved to the side in order to give the stuntmen room to work, casting Priyanka Chopra Jonas as a former death dealing pirate forced to protect her family works tremendously well as the actress hurls herself into battle. A times, her ex-pirate/warrior mother antics feel like it’s trying to riff on and blend together the kind of stuff Gina Davis did in both Cutthroat Island (boo!) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (yay!) and the sight of her, eyes blazing and streaked with gore, is strong enough to carry it through most of the way. Taking that baton and running with it is Karl Urban who is obviously loving his opportunity to villain-up his filmography a bit by playing the swaggering Conner and while there’s more than a hint of Billy the Butcher lurking within his antagonist, he and Priyanka proves to be worthy opponents. It’s just a shame that virtually no other character makes much of a splash and the film is far more interested in focusing on what a close range cannonball does to the human body (which is admittedly pretty spectacular), than adequately fleshing out the supporting cast to be more than slightly irritating distractions. The final result ends up as a cool, but empty exercise in heavy-handed swashbuckling that swaps out the ghosts, aquatic cryptids and pratfalling of the Jack Sparrow era for good old blunt force trauma, but forgets to add anything else of worth to it’s haul. Yes, both Chopra and Urban make good opponents and the action is nice and fleet of foot, but The Bluff could have benefited from a a bit more stuff.
Making landfall strangely late to take advantage of any enthusiasm there still may remain for pirate movies, at first The Bluff does prove to be pretty diverting. But while the graphic violence and a genuinely intimidating Chopra prove to be fun additions, the movie soon runs aground thanks to a non-existant plot and vapid supporting characters that dull the thrill of a pirate flick that’s enthusiastically rated Arrrrrrrr.
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