Can't get enough of that refreshing Bluff
dir: Frank E. Flowers
2026
Pirates! Remember when we, and by “we” I mean I used to look forward to movies about pirates doing piratical things? I loved and love pirates to bits.
Pirates of Penzance, Captain Blood, Treasure Island, Cutthroat Island, The Pirates!: Band of Misfits, Yellowbeard , Our Flag Means Death, Black Sails the list is endless and that’s a great thing! Who doesn’t love / isn’t sick of ‘Talk Like a Pirate’ Day? Maybe that’s showing my Western privilege: not everyone, admittedly, has the luxury of irritating their co-workers only on that one day a year by summoning their heartiest “Yarghs!!!”
And so many games I’ve played over so many years, especially the classic Sid Meir’s Pirates!, the original and best, and the Port Royale series, and more recently Sea of Thieves, Assassins’ Creed: Black Flag and Skull and Bones, absolute time sinks, all of them.
Can’t get enough of the stuff. And then there was that film, what was it called, oh yeah something about Pirates of the Caribbean, and their Black Pearl that happened to be under a Curse. Remember when (briefly) Jack Sparrow was everywhere, and Johnny Depp was the biggest star in the world and they were paying him $25 million dollars a movie?
And then all the other increasingly terrible movies came out in the series, and we started hating all that bullshit, and more importantly, at least for me, we found out Depp was an abusive alcoholic piece of shit who not only abused his former partner(s) but also hired PR firms to blacken their names and to engage bot farms to generate so much negative publicity on social media about them that the victims became hated targets, and the perpetrator sailed away, scot free like always?
Ah, those were the days. I can’t talk about those flicks anymore because I refuse to talk further about that piece of shit, and I refuse to watch any future movie he’s in, so where does that leave me? Like the sheeple fucking basic bitch that I am, it leaves me saying “the first Pirates OTC movie was great, they should make more action pirate-y movies!”
And they did! For Amazon! (boo, Jeffrey Bezos, I boo what you’re doing)
And even if they say it’s set on an island called Cayman Brac in the Caribbean, at the tail end of the Golden Age of Piracy, when most countries that could be colonised had been by the European powers, it was clearly made last year or so in Queensland! So yay patriotism.
This flick has three strong things going for it. First of all, it’s about pirates, so it’s already in my good books. It has a bunch of Australian and Kiwi actors in it, which isn’t necessarily a guarantee of quality, but it at least predisposes me towards liking it. The great David Field is in it, who has been in almost every Australian film ever made since Ghosts… of the Civil Dead up to and including Two Hands, Chopper and some very creepy commercials for a flavoured milk whose purpose was to kill a marketing-created sensation known as “hungrythirsty”.
But there’s also the legendary Temeura Morrison, every bit as majestic and commanding as he ever was, just, you know, a lot older, like all of us.
All of that counts as “one” thing. The two real assets this flick has is Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who gives a sensational performance as the main character, something I could never have predicted based on her previous work, and Karl fucking Urban as the villainous Connor.
He’s another Kiwi, so another point in their column, but they also sneak some Te Reo Maori into the script at a few points, which is also a bonus.
Karl Urban is such a charming fucking rogue. I almost hate him for it, but then he looks at you with those smoky eyes and… what was I saying? How does he go through so much of this film eye-fucking everything, from the scenery to the waves, but especially our main character Ercell, and get paid to do it?
Ercell? I know, it’s not a great name, but I doubt Priyanka chose it. Ercell lives a quiet life in the Cayman islands looking after her son Isaac, who seems to have mild cerebral palsy, and her sister-in-law Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green), who looks like she’s fifteen, but this being the age it is, she is determined to run off with some loser and probably get married / knocked up / up the duff / somewhere near The Bluff.
Ercell strongly advises her against whatever it is she wants to do, because teenagers can be so dumb, but she’s additionally distracted because her darling husband, Captain T.H. (Ismael Cruz Córdova) has been missing at sea for weeks.
She doesn’t know. She has no clue that Connor and his dastardly crew of jerks have attacked the ship and taken him prisoner, just so that they can find her. So very salty, these sea dogs, the saltiest.
So when they venture forth to her island, which seems to have only the most trusting and gullible people on it, she has to transform back into who she was before in order to protect herself and her fam. And the gold she stole from the dastardly Connor, she has to protect that too.
When these jerks attack her in her home, she gets into an elaborate fight where she’s pulling out jerks’ dreadlocks and using ever implement in the house in order to kill these two motherfuckers.
Clearly this is not the first time she has been in a life and death struggle and had to happily dispatch opponents. Even if the choreography isn’t the greatest and there’s a bit too much overediting, Priyanka throws herself into the fighting with such gusto that you feel like she’s just been waiting and waiting for an opportunity to go absolutely feral on camera and totally fuck some jerks up.
This is a bloody, violent action film, as is should be, for crying out loud. Pirates are not renowned for their cleanliness or their soft “people” skills resolving complicated situations, no, they are not. Everything is on offer here, guns of course, lots of sword and knifefighting, and even blowing up people with cannons!
Thing is, though, I’ve generally not got a problem with someone butchering people as long as a) the people being butchered are terrible people (tick) and the person doing it does it with style and gusto (double tick).
At various points she kills people with ways and in manners that I never imagined, so there’s also that in the flick’s favour. Every smartarse line or quip is generally Ercell’s with the remainders going to Connor, who could make a line like “I have already emptied the dishwasher” sound like the filthiest, smuttiest, most sexually charged line of pornography possible.
If this movie makes mistakes, and it makes tonnes of them, it does, only for my money, two things deeply wrong: it keeps Ercell and Connor away from each other way too long, because that sexual energy could have been used, if channelled correctly, to power every home on the eastern coast of Australia, but more problematically, Connor mostly devolves into just being a vengeful ex-partner who threatens to kill the family she has made since leaving him, just like plenty of awful losers in real life do, with shameful, tragic results.
I don’t need to be reminded of real life; fuck, don’t we all occasionally need a break from all of the things that are happening at the moment?
My consolation becomes, well, at least Priyanka Chopra Jonas is an absolute killing machine tearing through these terrible pirates with righteous fury, and I delighted in seeing her do her thing, however choppy the editing, however negligent the lighting in certain scenes. I would happily pay to watch at least three more of these films with her carving and shooting her way across the Caribbean (somewhere near Noosa) until all the other unrepentant pirates are gone, and she is the only one left standing, glorious, like the Wonder Woman she is. In fact get her to play Wonder Woman as well, though there would probably have to be less man killing, which would be a shame.
The Bluff is not “good” cinema, but it is enjoyable cinema, the kind of stuff I crave on a Thursday night, just like pizza and beer. I know it’s not healthy for me, for anyone, but by fuck am I going to enjoy the heck out of it.
7 times the only thing better than watching her kill dozens of pirates would have been watching her kill hundreds of pirates out of 10
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“This only ends with the sand soaked in his blood or mine.” – why not both? - The Bluff
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