The Bluff Review: Priyanka Chopra Jonas Shines in a Brutal Pirate Drama on Prime Video

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There’s a moment early in The Bluff when the film announces exactly what kind of experience it intends to be. Priyanka Chopra Jonas, playing a quiet Caymanian wife and mother named Ercell, finds herself cornered in her kitchen by a hulking pirate. She doesn’t reach for anything resembling a proper weapon. Instead, her fingers close around a heavy conch shell sitting on the counter. What follows isn’t choreographed combat—it’s desperate, ugly survival. The message lands clearly: this isn’t swashbuckling adventure. This is something rawer.

The Bluff arrived on Prime Video on February 25, 2026, carrying considerable expectations. Produced by the Russo brothers’ AGBO studios the team behind several record-breaking Marvel films—and starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas alongside Karl Urban, it promised a gritty reimagining of the pirate genre. In this The Bluff review, after multiple viewings and careful consideration, what emerges is a film of stark contradictions: a star-driven vehicle where the lead outshines the material, an action film more invested in maternal trauma than treasure maps, and a period piece that ultimately can’t decide what it wants to become.

The Story: Survival Disguised as Adventure

Let’s address the misconception immediately: The Bluff is not a high-seas adventure. If you arrive expecting ships firing cannons and crews hunting buried gold, you’ll leave disappointed. The film, set in the late 1800s on the island of Cayman Brac, is deliberately claustrophobic by design.

We meet Ercell Bodden living a quiet existence with her fisherman husband T.H. (Ismael Cruz Córdova), their young disabled son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo), and Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green), her grieving sister-in-law. She tends her garden, soothes her son’s fears, and attempts to outrun a past she has literally buried—along with a fortune in stolen gold.

That past arrives not by ship but through her front door. Pirates storm her home, kidnap her husband, and leave her bleeding on the floor. The leader is Captain Connor (Karl Urban), and he knows Ercell intimately. She wasn’t always a village wife. She was once “Bloody Mary,” a pirate as feared as any man in his crew, and his former lover.

What follows isn’t a rescue mission. Ercell, Elizabeth, and young Isaac flee into the island’s interior, navigating crocodile-infested rivers, scaling limestone cliffs, and hiding in sea caves while Connor and his men hunt them. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly during the film’s promotional tour, Urban described his character as consumed by personal obsession rather than greed—a spurned narcissist who views Ercell’s escape as unforgivable betrayal.

This structure transforms The Bluff into something closer to a survival thriller than a pirate epic. It’s The Revenant meets Straw Dogs, set against Caribbean beauty and soaked in Caribbean blood.

The Performance That Anchors Everything – The Bluff Review

If you take one thing from this review, let it be this: Priyanka Chopra Jonas is the reason to watch The Bluff. She doesn’t simply play the lead—she anchors the entire production with a performance that balances physical intensity and emotional vulnerability in ways most action films don’t bother attempting.

The Physical Commitment

Watching Chopra Jonas move through The Bluff, you sense an actor who did the work. In interviews with Variety leading up to the release, she discussed researching real historical female pirates—Ireland’s Grace O’Malley, who commanded fleets while raising children, and China’s Zheng Yi Sao, who terrified the Qing dynasty. What she learned shaped her approach: pirate life wasn’t romantic. It was, as she described it, “scary, bloody, and brutal.”

That understanding translates directly to her physicality. Ercell doesn’t fight like someone trained in martial arts. She fights like someone who learned to survive through sheer desperation. She grabs hair, throws sand, uses furniture as weapons. In one grueling sequence, she’s dragged across a rough wooden floor, and the exhaustion on her face feels authentic because, by her own account shared during the Today Show appearance, it was. She reportedly suffered countless splinters during filming, and you believe every one of them.

The Emotional Core

What elevates Chopra Jonas beyond standard action hero territory is the vulnerability she layers beneath Ercell’s hardened exterior. During the The Hollywood Reporter actress roundtable, she spoke openly about drawing on her own experience as a mother, saying she would “go to the world’s end to protect my family.” That sentiment drives every violent choice Ercell makes.

Watch her eyes in quiet moments with Isaac. Watch how her body softens, how her voice drops to something almost musical. Then watch the transformation when danger approaches—the way her jaw tightens, how her shoulders square, the cold clarity that replaces warmth. Chopra Jonas makes you believe these two women occupy the same body, and more importantly, she makes you understand why Ercell buried “Bloody Mary” in the first place. The violence costs her something. We feel that cost.

The Technical Hurdle

The performance isn’t flawless. Her Caribbean accent wavers occasionally, particularly in emotionally charged scenes where maintaining dialect while accessing deep feeling proves challenging. It’s noticeable but not distracting—a minor imperfection in an otherwise commanding turn.

The Action: Brutal by Design, Familiar by Execution

Director Frank E. Flowers, working with the Russo brothers’ production team, made a deliberate choice to pursue an R-rating, and the film earns every minute of it. In production notes shared with press outlets, Flowers emphasized his desire to make the violence feel authentic rather than glamorous. The result lands with uncomfortable weight.

Flowers, a Caymanian native making what feels like a deeply personal project, has described the film as a “home-invasion thriller in the scariest sense” during interviews with Deadline. He wanted audiences to feel the violation of safety, the terror of predators entering domestic space. In that regard, he succeeds. The opening attack on Ercell’s home is genuinely tense, chaotic in ways that feel authentic rather than choreographed.

Yet here’s where The Bluff reveals its central weakness: the action, while competently executed, lacks distinct identity. Since John Wick redefined screen combat in 2014, countless films have borrowed its language—the gritty realism, the close-quarters brutality, the “one-take” sequences. The Bluff borrows heavily from this playbook without adding anything new to the conversation.

The film wants it both ways. It wants the visceral impact of modern action cinema while dressing in 19th-century costume. The result is action that excites in the moment but fades from memory afterward. There’s no iconic sword fight here, no set piece that will generate discussion years later. There are just well-executed brawls wearing period clothing.

The Visual Language: Caribbean Soul, Australian Backdrop

One of the film’s most fascinating production details is geographic: The Bluff, a story deeply rooted in Caymanian identity, was primarily filmed on Australia’s Gold Coast using water tanks and local landscapes standing in for the Caribbean. Production designer Steven Jones-Evans explained in Art of the Frame that the team studied extensive reference photography of the Cayman Islands to replicate specific vegetation, rock formations, and light quality.

Yet somehow, it works. Flowers’s direction ensures the camera treats the environment as sacred. He lingers on turquoise water, sun-bleached cottages, dense mangrove forests. The island becomes more than setting—it’s a character, representing the peace Ercell has built and the paradise Connor threatens to destroy.

This visual approach creates effective contrast. The violence feels more jarring against natural beauty. But the setting remains underutilized thematically. The island functions as beautiful obstacle course rather than active participant in the story. Compare this to something like The Witch, where the forest breathes with malevolent intention. Here, the titular bluff is just a large rock the characters must climb.

Where the Film Falters: Missed Opportunities

For all of Chopra Jonas’s considerable efforts, The Bluff never quite transcends its genre limitations. At 101 minutes, it feels simultaneously rushed and underdeveloped.

The Villain Problem

Karl Urban brings genuine menace to Captain Connor. His physical presence commands attention, and his voice carries the weight of someone accustomed to violence. But the script fails him completely.

We’re told Connor is obsessed. We’re told he views Ercell’s departure as unforgivable betrayal. But we’re never shown what made their relationship meaningful enough to warrant this obsession. We’re never given moments that humanize him or explain his pathology beyond surface-level narcissism. He becomes a plot device—a wall for Ercell to crash against—rather than a fully realized antagonist. His death should feel cathartic. Instead, it feels inevitable and empty.

The Emotional Shallowness

This points to the film’s deepest flaw. We’re told Ercell was a legendary pirate, but we never sit with the trauma of that life. Flashbacks arrive as brief placeholder images rather than emotionally weighted memories. We understand she’s running from something. We never feel why it haunts her.

The film gestures toward weighty themes—colonialism’s violence, motherhood’s sacrifices, the cost of buried history—but refuses to engage them deeply. Colonial powers are mentioned but never shown. The East India Trading Company looms as vague threat rather than specific evil. Race and power dynamics hover at the narrative’s edges without ever entering its center.

The Chemistry Void

Urban and Chopra Jonas share minimal screen time together, which might be strategic but feels like avoidance. Their shared history should create electric tension every moment they occupy the same frame. Instead, their confrontations feel mechanical—required beats on the way to the next action sequence. Given both actors’ proven chemistry with other performers in other projects, the failure here lands squarely on direction and script.

The supporting cast, including Temuera Morrison in a thankless role, passes through the story without leaving meaningful impression. Characters exist to advance plot rather than illuminate theme.

The Thematic Tension Worth Examining

Despite its flaws, The Bluff does something interesting worth examining: it presents motherhood and violence as inseparable rather than contradictory.

Ercell’s journey isn’t about rediscovering her capacity for violence. That capacity never left her. It’s about reconciling the woman who kills with the woman who nurtures. When she fights, she fights for Isaac. When she kills, she kills so Isaac can live. The blood on her hands and the gentleness in her touch toward her son aren’t opposing forces—they’re expressions of the same love.

This theme resonates more deeply than the film perhaps intended. Chopra Jonas’s performance sells this duality completely. Watch her after violent encounters—how she checks herself before approaching Isaac, how she wipes blood from her hands before touching him, how her eyes shift from killer coldness to maternal warmth. These transitions feel real because she’s playing one woman with two necessary faces, not two different women sharing a body.

Who Should Watch This Film?

After sitting with The Bluff and considering its contradictions, here’s honest guidance:

Watch it if: You’re a Priyanka Chopra Jonas fan who wants to see her command a leading role with full commitment. Her performance justifies the price of admission and suggests she could carry major action franchises if given proper material. You’ll also appreciate it if you enjoy survival thrillers with brutal action and beautiful locations, provided you don’t expect deep thematic engagement.

Skip it if: You’re seeking thoughtful pirate drama with historical weight or character complexity. You’ll leave frustrated by missed opportunities and shallow treatment of serious themes. Similarly, if you’re tired of post-John Wick action aesthetics, this film won’t change your mind.

A Star in Search of Worthy Material

The Bluff frustrates because it contains a great performance trapped inside a mediocre film. Priyanka Chopra Jonas gives everything to Ercell, investing her with physical authenticity and emotional depth that transcend the script’s limitations. She proves beyond question that she can anchor big-budget action cinema, carrying fight sequences and quiet character moments with equal skill.

But great performances cannot save films from themselves. The Bluff assembles components from better movies—Kill Bill‘s maternal vengeance, John Wick‘s gritty combat, The Revenant‘s survival framework—without forging them into something new. It mistakes darkness for depth.

The result is a film you’ll respect more than love, admire more than recommend. Chopra Jonas deserves the vehicle this should have been. Instead, she gets a showcase for her talent within a production that never rises to meet her.

Grade: C+

A performance worth watching. A film worth discussing for what it could have been.

The Bluff is currently streaming on Prime Video. Runtime: 101 minutes. Rated R for strong violence throughout, bloody images, and language.

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