The Bluff

The Bluff isn’t the same kind of pirate film as Pirates of the Caribbean. Unlike the leviathan Disney franchise, The Bluff has very little seafaring, the violence is grueling, and it’s about small folk rather than rich captains and governors’ daughters. The perspective shift is the film’s main draw. Cayman Islands native Frank E. Flowers’ approach to the industry of piracy de-romanticizes the rogue seafarers and uses grim social conditions to realize pirates that a smart viewer can root for without guilt or reprise. 

Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Bollywood favorite turned international star, plays a former indentured servant (slave, though she didn’t use that word) turned retired pirate captain in the 1840s. She looks after her sister-in-law (Safia Oakley-Green), who does absolutely nothing, and her own physically disabled son (Vedanten Naidoo). Her husband, T.H. Bodden (Ismael Cruz Córdova), is out at sea when an old rival pirate, Captain Connor (Karl Urban), shows up and disrupts her peaceful domestic life on Cayman Brac, one of the three Cayman Islands. Her nickname once upon a time was “Bloody Mary,” though she, like the Apostle Paul upon his conversion, now goes by a new name: Ercell Bodden. But now Ercell picks up her old blade — and an assortment of other weapons, including an alien-looking harmonica pistol where the bullet cartridge protrudes horizontally from the side of the gun — to become Bloody Mary again in order to keep her family alive. 

The film’s title is a double entendre. Its primary reference is to the lesser known geographical feature of a cliff or rockface overlooking a body of water that becomes an important terrestrial location in the film. Specifically, the bluff of the title refers to the iconic cliffs of the Cayman Brac, even though, disappointingly, they had to film in Australia. The title also refers to the falsehoods and general backstabbing in which the criminals trade. Both flavors of bluffs arrive in abundance in The Bluff.

The white-skinned and Commonwealth-accented Urban makes a great foil to Chopra Jonas here, a brown-skinned Indian woman. 

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