Disclaimer: I’m a blind film critic. I watch films with audio description, and this film had audio description on Amazon.

This movie made me want to watch Cutthroat Island again. Take that for what you will.The 1995 flop that starred Geena Davis didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world when I saw it at age 12, but then again, neither did Waterworld. Now those cheesy remnants of the 1990’s are on a very different level.In 2026, Amazon tried to do what seems like a perpetually futile and stupid gesture and make a pirate film. You would think that this genre wouldn’t be so deeply troubled outside of the Johnny Depp led Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise, but with shows like Black Sails and One Piece, pirating seems better suited for television than film. Perhaps it is the lore behind each pirate, bringing out the stories that got them to the legends they are.

Amazon’s continued investments into the careers of Karl Urban (The Boys) and Priyanka Chopra-Jonas (Citadel) is evident. Chopra-Jonas plays a former pirate known as Bloody Mary, who has since given up her pirating days, and lives a simple life raising her young son with her new husband. But, soon a pirate (Urban) from her past comes back to haunt her in a brutal fashion. If nothing else, the Bluff strives to be a bloody affair. The amount of blood here, for a film with a character named Bloody Mary, feels intentional. She has to prove that she was worth being a legend, and there isn’t a lot of extra time to do this. The script is clunky, the lore is fleshed out in expository fashion, seemingly not shaping a world, but concerned only that we have enough information to not be lost.

So instead of inspiring, or creating a crew of pirates with individual personalities for us to fall in love with, or even care about, everyone really functions as bodies waiting to be executed or to execute. It’s a mess of a film, one that isn’t totally uninteresting, but rather one that feels stuck in an early draft phase. The problem with many streaming films is that they often seem like a focus group shy of meaningful feedback, constructive studio notes likely never were given, and in an effort to spend as little as possible, reshoots are unheard of. So if director Frank E. Flowers didn’t get it right out of the gate, Amazon accepts it as it is. It isn’t really interested in tweaking it to make it better, offering suggestions on cuts, or finding out if there’s a part of the story the audience would want expanded.

For example, I’d have loved to see more up front of Bloody MAry’s simple life, with this husband of hers, and her lighter touch as a mother. Instead, the film leans pervasively on a darker tone. Any scene with brevity is almost immediately smothered by bloodlust. What does work, is that Bloody Mary isn’t just some overpowered action chick trope that somehow defeats a room full of men twice her size through brute force. Instead, it shows her being resourceful, able to handle a sword or gun, and relying on tunnels and traps to outwit and outsmart.

Urban’s pirate also comes in hot, but could have benefitted from a slower and calmer approach, one that also built him up so it wasn’t all show no tell. He comes across as just a run of the mill baddie you’d defeat early in a video game, instead of potentially the final boss, or a true legend. How they handled Barbosa in Pirates, for example, had far more style. Urban just simply deserved better. For an actor adept at traversing antiheroes, he could have made for a truly interesting and compelling villain, but instead, he winds up forgettable.

Hell, I kept waiting to see if the film would dare to be complex enough to make a doubl meaning out of the title, and actually push a bluff element here. I suppose anytime someone believes a lie, they could be trapped in a bluff, but the little instances along the way don’t measure up to what it needed to be.

The audio description was mostly fine, though I did laugh at the use of “disintegrated”. Only because I think whatever firepower they had for that kill shot likely didn’t disintegrate as much as it did obliterate.

Any film that encourages me to revisit Cutthroat Island gives me pause, but The Bluff is a good idea never allowed to truly pillage its potential.

Rotten: 5.1/10