The Bluff Review: There's A New Action Hero In Town And Her Name Is Priyanka Chopra

Title: The Bluff

Director: Frank E. Flowers

Cast: Priyanka Chopra, Karl Urban and others

Where: Prime Video

Rating: 3.5 Stars

There’s a new action hero in town and her name is Priyanka Chopra. Priyanka stars in The Bluff, an action thriller film directed by Frank E. Flowers. The story, based in the late 19th century Caribbean, is about a former pirate who must protect her family when her past catches up with her.

With a runtime of only 1 hour 41 minutes, The Bluff uses the advantage of a short duration by not testing your patience in spending too much time in the build up of the story. The premise is simple-pirates take over a ship, go back to the ship owner’s home to find gold which they believe lies with his wife. The only thing standing between them and the loot is Priyanka Chopra. What is interesting is the choice of Priyanka Chopra as the hero in this case, because the villain is a colonizer from the East India Company, having roots in our own colonial history.

Actors’ performances

Karl Urban as Captain Connor is merciless, just like the rest of his pirate crew and a most dependable actor for crucial lead parts, whether we consider this project, 300 or The Boys.

Safia Oakley-Green as Elizabeth Bodden, Priyanka’s sister-in-law and Vedanten Naidoo as Isaac, her son, both do justice to their roles. The rest of the actors too, no matter how small their roles, add to the strength of the movie.

Priyanka in the first few minutes of the movie portrays the head of the household who reads bedside stories to her son. When attacked initially, she is thrown around like a rag doll, taking brutal beatings. But then she goes back to her former self, a feared pirate. She starts slicing up the buccaneers who were overconfident enough to cross paths with her. Of course, what she has going in her favour is that she knows that entire island very well. So it’s akin to the first part of Rambo when the force attacks him in the place he feels the most comfortable at the wilderness of the jungle. You may carry all the ammunition which you require to massacre an entire town, but you don’t have the foreknowledge that crossing that shallow lake isn’t going to be as mundane as you think, especially when an alligator lurks underneath.

The fight sequences, especially the ones with Priyanka, are like a tutorial on how to use everyday devices lying around the house to your own defence, whether it is a saucer pan or a broken bottle. But all that comes with her background in the movie as she was a dreaded pirate known as Bloody Mary before she settled for the peaceful family life. Like I said in the beginning, there’s a new action hero in town, and her name is Priyanka Chopra.

Having been set in around 1876, the action obviously doesn’t include the tools of modern warfare, but muskets, cannons and swords, which give it a novel touch, rather than the ultra modern warfare tools we've grown used to watching.

FPJ verdict

Watch it for Priyanka in a new avatar and a completely different set up.