Amazon Prime’s new pirate flick, The Bluff, starring Priyanka Chopra, is a damn good movie. And that’s right – it’s a pirate movie! It’s been more than 20 years since the magic of Pirates of the Caribbean, and in a media landscape of reboots and sequels where the people cry out for something, anything original, this sweeping swashbuckler was like a tall glass of water after a marathon of schlock.
The Bluff unravels its mystery slowly, opening on the capture of a ship captain named Bodden (Ismael Cruz Córdova) and the swift execution of his entire crew. Then, viewers are treated to a tranquil British settlement in the Cayman Islands in the 1850s, where a mother bakes a coconut birthday cake for her son in a house suspiciously rigged with makeshift tripwires and burglar alarms. As it turns out, that mother is Priyanka Chopra’s quick witted and resourceful ex-pirate Mrs. Ercell Bodden, and her husband’s captors are on the way to the island to hunt her down for abandoning them and stealing their loot. The pirates of the Libertas land on the beaches of Cayman Brac, and the scenes that follow show a Viking-esque slaughter of half the island.
The Bluff accomplishes a great deal as a film – it’s an exciting movie, a slick action thriller, a powerful female led film, and a rare mainstream pirate movie. But it’s also a portrait of the colonizer legacy of pirates. Far from painting the villains as handsome Dread Pirate Robertses, the pirates are grounded in historical reality as Ercell’s backstory slowly unfolds. The Bluff reveals that the villainous pirates of the Libertas were no ordinary rogues, but were privateers for the British East India Company. As the film’s villain, Captain Connor (Karl Urban) explains, “we filled their coffers and built their colonies,” but, he laments, “their modern world no longer holds accord with our ways.” Loosed by their employers, the pirates kidnap a group of indentured servants in British occupied India that includes young Ercell, who is promptly adopted by Connor and trained into a killing machine. Throughout the movie, Ercell reveals her past to her family and reckons with her actions as a victim of British imperialism and a perpetrator of violence herself. From a man being blown up with a cannon at point blank range to Ercell ripping the braids out of the scalp of her attackers, this movie doesn’t attempt to obscure the racial, gendered, or literal violence of historical piracy.
In reckoning with the reality of historical piracy, which is of course intertwined with colonization, imperialism, and slavery, the movie’s diversity is to its credit. Mr. Bodden and his sister in-law Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green) are Black Caribbeans, descendants of the African diaspora, and the relationship between Ercell and Connor explores the dangerous reality for Indians living under British occupation. Additionally, Ercell’s son Isaac (Vedanten Naidoo) is disabled, a mobile wheelchair user, and the character is treated ordinarily and with respect. With that said, this movie is no Bridgerton, trying to score diversity points. It’s not a girl power movie either – if anything, Ercell assumes a manly action star’s role, fighting for gold, family, and revenge – with a staggering kill count to boot. The Bluff’s diversity isn’t an afterthought or an aesthetic, but central to the film. Most of all, it’s an invitation for viewers to question what they think they know about the Golden Age of Piracy.
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