In a recent interview to promote her new film The Bluff, Priyanka Chopra Jonas put her pivot to Hollywood down to feeling “limited” by the Bollywood industry that first made her a star. In the decade since she began focusing on American film roles, it’s been hard to work out exactly what Chopra Jonas was being held back from. Aside from an acclaimed turn in 2021’s Bafta-nominated The White Tiger, the actor and sometime Pitbull collaborator has generally favored mindless, straight-down-the middle entertainment such as the Céline Dion-centered rom-com Love Again and the insipid spy series Citadel. I couldn’t get through the pilot of the latter, but it is Amazon Prime’s second most-watched show of all time.
The Bluff marks a return to Chopra Jonas in action heroine mode, 10 years after her western breakout TV show Quantico. The twist? This time, she is a 19th century pirate. Her character Ercell “Bloody Mary” Bodden grew up sailing the seven seas, but when we meet her she has long left her swashbuckling ways behind her. She lives an idyllic life on Cayman Brac, settled in a town with conch shell-lined walkways and where her neighbors happily cook up turtle soup for their colonial masters. She can still jerryrig a machete in five seconds flat, but these days it is used to chop down coconuts for her young family. Ercell is anxiously waiting for her husband TH (The Rings of Power’s Ismael Cruz Córdova) to return from sea, not knowing that he has been kidnapped by captain Connor (Star Trek’s Karl Urban), her former mentor and one of the most fearsome pirates of them all.
Ercell’s calm life is interrupted when her home is set upon by buccaneers who are after her gold, resulting in an explosive fight where she slashes at them with a dagger, pulls one’s dreadlocks out by their bloody roots, and sends a gob of spit flying into another’s face. It sets the tone for the film’s intricately-choreographed action scenes that don’t dispense with grit, and Chopra Jonas throws herself into the role’s physical demands. The fighting dirty may not be for the squeamish but I found The Bluff’s nods to the splatter genre to be good gross-out fun, particularly when blood hits the camera lens. If this wasn’t going straight-to-Prime, it’s one of the few films I’d actually want to see in 4DX.
The home invasion is just a taste of what’s to come. The island has been overtaken by Connor’s army, a hunky brute who is prone to making ominous philosophical speeches while staring at the sea. “No one leaves this island until I collect my property,” he roars as his men storm the beaches. He’s not talking about gold but Ercell herself, who he sees as his possession.
Happily, Ercell discovers that being a pirate is like riding a bike, and she clicks into Bloody Mary mode to fight back. The film becomes a cat-and-mouse chase across mangroves and a river swarming with alligators that have a taste for human flesh. Ercell finds increasingly violent and creative ways to kill men amidst Cayman Brac’s beautiful natural settings including Skull Cave, which looks like an underground lair on Tatooine. Frank E Flowers, the director, provides high-octane flair, while production duo the Russo brothers (Avengers: Endgame) help bring the island to immersive and lush life.
You don’t watch a film like The Bluff for the dialogue, but I could have done with less of the cartoonish sexism of the pirates who jeer “Bloody Mary reduced to a fish wife” as well as Ercell’s irritating step-daughter who is responsible for expository clangers like “Who is that horrible man, and why are you so good at killing people?” And while it’s fun to hear the grown-up details of Bloody Mary’s backstory (a tale of her lashing the severed genitals of men who crossed her to her ship’s bowsprit still gives me shivers), I’d have also welcomed some erotic sizzle between Ercell and Connor, whose below-deck history is brushed off with a vague reference to things happening at sea.
Chopra Jonas gamely commits to the pulpiness of The Bluff, even as it doesn’t ask much of her beyond its impressive action sequences and a few tart one-liners. But there’s cinematic swoop to the movie that you might not expect in a straight-to-streaming swashbuckler, and you feel the grisliness as she drags herself along the ground in blood-splattered clothes like so many final girls of gory slashers before her. “Real pirates are murderers, not heroes,” Chopra Jonas says portentously at one point. She’s good at playing both.
