{"id":445594,"date":"2026-02-25T23:03:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T23:03:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/445594\/"},"modified":"2026-02-25T23:03:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T23:03:09","slug":"john-wick-action-meets-pirates-near-the-caribbean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/445594\/","title":{"rendered":"John Wick action meets Pirates Near the Caribbean"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe golden age of piracy is over,\u201d says Captain Connor (Karl Urban), the vengeful, crafty villain of the Prime Video pirate action movie The Bluff. This may sound like a familiar lament to fans of Disney\u2019s Pirates of the Caribbean movies<\/a>, which are set near the end of the Golden Age of Piracy<\/a>, and repeatedly discuss pirates’ waning fortunes. The Bluff takes place in 1846, nearly a century later than the most recent Pirates sequel<\/a> \u2014 which means Connor is both correct, and unusually attuned to future historical designations. His pronouncement matches the movie\u2019s opening on-screen text, which reads, intentionally or not, like a shot fired at the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise: \u201cThe era of pirates on the Caribbean Sea is dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a more flexible and less family-friendly franchise, The Bluff might have actually made a fine late-period Pirates of the Caribbean sequel. Karl Urban is particularly good casting: He seems like he could have played a supporting role in one of the Pirates sequels, especially the later-period ones without original director Gore Verbinski<\/a>. But while those films still leaned heavily on the franchise\u2019s fantasy elements, this non-sequel instead takes its influences from the R-rated likes of John Wick and Die Hard.<\/p>\n

Indian superstar Priyanka Chopra Jonas (The Matrix Resurrections<\/a>) takes the Wick-ish role of Ercell, formerly a pirate known as Bloody Mary, before she retired to a quiet family life on a small Caribbean island. There, she tends to her disabled son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo) and her sister-in-law Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green), as her husband T.H. (Ismael Cruz C\u00f3rdova) takes work off the island. At sea, T.H. is intercepted by Connor and his quartermaster Lee (Temuera Morrison<\/a>, the Star Wars movies\u2019 Boba and Jango Fett), who are seeking a cache of gold coins Bloody Mary stole. Eventually, this brings them to Ercell\u2019s doorstep. Forced into a Die Hard-style tight spot, she reacts with Wickian ferocity, taking down scores of anonymous henchmen.<\/p>\n

This means that in spite of its pirate characters, The Bluff is not a seafaring adventure; production shooting on the water is notoriously expensive, after all. This is more like Pirates Near the Caribbean. Even the film\u2019s attempts at proximity to the sea are sometimes visually sketchy; the fakest-looking sequence in this otherwise fairly handsome production involves a climactic swordfight atop the titular bluff, with the sea unconvincingly green-screened into the background.<\/p>\n

\"Priyanka
\n Image: Amazon\/MGM<\/p>\n

Most of the action in The Bluff is more impressive. Director Frank E. Flowers \u2014 who actually hails from the Caribbean, born in the Cayman Islands! \u2014 prioritizes bloody, multi-weapon scrapping over swashbuckling swordplay, and doesn\u2019t over-cut his action to accommodate the closer quarters. While the film\u2019s story threatens to bog down in loved-one endangerment and grim vows of revenge, the nastiness of its various stabbings, slashings, and shootings distinguishes The Bluff from its pirate predecessors.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s missing is a greater sense of purpose, whether that would be high-flying adventure or a stronger sense of elegiac loneliness in the lives of post-peak pirates. Instead, the filmmakers can\u2019t resist turning Ercell into a highly contemporary (and very actor-flattering) noble badass, one who can dispatch plenty of bad guys with quick-thinking agility, and gets righteously feral whenever her family is threatened. Though a handful of barely-there flashbacks attempt to shoehorn in some tender romance between Ercella and T.H., romantic relationships (or any relationships outside the purview of \u201cfiercely protective mother\u201d) aren\u2019t really the subject of this movie, any more than they are in most Marvel pictures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Karl
\n Image: Amazon\/MGM<\/p>\n

Romance doesn\u2019t have to be front and center in The Bluff, or any other pirate movie; there\u2019s no rule that they require a minimum amount of Will-and-Elizabeth-style swooning, or for that matter, Jack Sparrow-style japery<\/a>. But the relentless focus on a mother defending her homestead makes a lot of the pirate garb feel like window dressing. At its lean and efficient best, the movie feels sort of like a pirate take on a violent Western. As its most generic, it feels like any other limited-location action thriller, especially when the action relocates from the sun-dappled beaches to the dim tunnels beneath the bluffs.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s too bad, because purely as an action hero, Priyanka Chopra Jonas acquits herself well, while Urban and Morrison make fine antagonists \u2014 not necessarily villains, despite their ruthless misdeeds, because both actors have a gift for making pulpy material seem more grounded than it really is. Maybe these villains could both still pop up in a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel (or ripoff) \u2014 one that places a little more emphasis on characters whose swaggering pirate panache must be redirected toward a desperate fight for survival. The Bluff gestures at some of those ideas before offering warrior-mom clich\u00e9s and a momentary good time.<\/p>\n

The Bluff is streaming on Amazon Video now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe golden age of piracy is over,\u201d says Captain Connor (Karl Urban), the vengeful, crafty villain of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":445595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-445594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}