Everything to Know About ‘The Bluff’: Priyanka Chopra's New Thriller

For this one, you should probably forget everything you think you know about pirate movies. The Bluff, which dropped on Prime Video on February 25th, is not interested in swashbuckling adventure or treasure maps and talking parrots. It is a home invasion thriller that happens to be set in the 19th-century Caribbean, and apparently, that distinction matters more than it sounds.

Directed by Frank E. Flowers and produced by the Russo Brothers' AGBO alongside Priyanka Chopra's own Purple Pebble Pictures, The Bluff arrives with a serious pedigree and a premise that earns its Hard-R rating early and often.

Ercell Bodden (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) has built herself a quiet life in the Cayman Islands. Husband, son, peace, the kind that only someone running from something could truly appreciate. What she is running from is a past as "Bloody Mary," one of the Caribbean's most feared pirates. That past arrives uninvited in the form of Captain Connor (Karl Urban), her former mentor, who has sailed a ruthless crew to her door in pursuit of treasure she stole from him years ago.

What follows is less a seafaring adventure and more a siege. Ercell is outmanned, outgunned, and fighting on her own turf, and the film leans hard into that claustrophobic tension. To protect her family, she has to become the person she buried. The question the film keeps asking is whether that version of her ever really went away.

Chopra carries the film's physical demands with commitment; the action choreography required genuine transformation. Karl Urban does what Karl Urban does, which is make villainy feel effortless and specific; his Captain Connor is menacing without being cartoonish. Ismael Cruz Córdova brings warmth to T.H. Bodden, Ercell's husband, in a role that could easily have been reduced to a helpless bystander. Temuera Morrison rounds out the crew as Lee, Connor's quartermaster and a reliable screen presence as ever.

The project was first announced back in 2021 with Zoe Saldaña attached to lead, and Netflix set to distribute, a very different film, on paper, from the one that landed on Prime Video this week. Saldaña eventually stepped back from the starring role, though she stayed close to the project as an executive producer, and in January 2024, Priyanka Chopra stepped in. 

Two months later, Amazon MGM Studios had acquired distribution rights, and Karl Urban was on board. The cast filled out through the rest of the year, with principal photography wrapping in early August 2024, just six months before its global premiere.

Flowers shot the film on the Gold Coast of Australia, standing in convincingly for the Cayman Islands, specifically Cayman Brac and the moody Skull Cave that features prominently in the film's tensest sequences. Henry Jackman, whose credits run from Captain America to Jumanji, handled the score.

The Bluff currently sits at 68% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is about right. Critics praising it point to the tension, Chopra's physicality, and the pace. Those less impressed flag a predictable third act and a backstory that never fills in the gaps it opens up.

The split is fair. The plot is not the film's strongest suit. The mechanics of why Connor wants what he wants and the history between him and Ercell are sketchy, and by the final act, seasoned thriller watchers will likely see where things are headed well before they arrive.

But one thing most viewers have agreed on is that the action choreography is genuinely top-tier, the tension in the middle act is well-built, and the film moves. At roughly two hours, it does not drag too long.

If you go in expecting a character study or a fresh reinvention of the genre, The Bluff will underwhelm. If you go in wanting a hard-edged, well-shot action thriller with a committed lead performance and a premise that at least tries something different with its setting and genre, it delivers that cleanly.

It is a good Friday night watch. Not a masterpiece, but a film that knows what it is and mostly executes it well. 

The Bluff is streaming now on Prime Video.

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