Amazon released "The Bluff" ("The Cliff") — a pirate action movie with Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Karl Urban. We chart the course through the film and find out where the treasures are buried and where the predictable reefs lie.

An experienced sailor knows: a map promises treasure but stays silent about dangers. "The Bluff" (or, as it was not unreasonably translated on Kinopoisk, "The Cliff") is exactly such a map. The last convincing pirate movie came out so long ago that the genre itself has become covered in sea slime. Amazon MGM Studios decided to revive the dead — with Priyanka Chopra Jonas as "Bloody Mary," Karl Urban as the villain, and the Russo brothers at the producer's helm. Let's chart the course.

📍 Point of Departure: Cayman Brac, Quiet Shore

The start of the route is deceptively calm. Ercell Bodden has long given up piracy — she lives on an island, raises a sick son, and waits for her husband from the sea. Director Frank Flowers gives this silence exactly as much time as needed to get acquainted with the heroine's daily life. Then Captain Connor arrives — and the silence ends forever.

⚠️ Pilot's note: the first fifteen minutes create a false impression that the script will be deeper than it is. Hold your course, don't be fooled.

📍 Reefs of Predictability — Navigation Difficult

Here the map honestly warns: a shoal ahead. The script of "The Bluff" moves along routes that many have already traveled, and doesn't even try to hide it: blackmail with loved ones, a secret from the past revealed at the most opportune moment, a final duel at dawn, on a cliff, with a good soundtrack. Flowers faithfully follows genre conventions, without a single unexpected turn of the helm. There's no gold here — but you don't run aground either: the pace simply doesn't allow it.

⚠️ Pilot's note: "predictable" is not a death sentence if the film doesn't pretend to be a revelation. "The Bluff" doesn't pretend.

📍 Lighthouse

The most reliable point on the entire route. Priyanka Chopra Jonas plays Ercell so that you believe both in the saber in her hand and the fatigue in her eyes. In scenes with her son, she is alive; in episodes with Connor, she is truly dangerous. It is she who holds the entire structure together where the script lets her down — and it does so regularly.

📍 Terra Incognita

Karl Urban as the villain is a treasure not marked on the map with an X. Connor could easily have been a cardboard cutthroat with pompous monologues about maritime honor. But Urban makes him something less clichéd: a resentful man with principles, which is scarier than any villainy. It's just a pity that the script doesn't give him a single line with even a slight smirk — everything is strict, frowning, without a gram of self-irony. And Temuera Morrison as the quartermaster is present more as decoration than as a full-fledged character: unfair, but true.

⚠️ Pilot's note: Urban as a villain is an argument in favor of watching in itself.

📍 Cave System — Final Act, Not for the Faint of Heart

Here the map finally delivers on its promise. The final third unfolds in caves, and Flowers works with darkness as a full-fledged tool, not a technical limitation. The space narrows, the air becomes thinner, the stakes higher. The fight choreography is tough and clear, without unnecessary editing cuts. And Henry Jackman in the soundtrack doesn't force emotions but merely maintains the pressure — exactly what is needed.

⚠️ Pilot's note: plenty of blood and severed limbs. Strictly 18+.

🏴‍☠️ X — Buried Here

"The Bluff" is not a big catch, but an honest haul. A film that perfectly understands what it is: a tough genre action movie without pretensions to revelations, but with real adrenaline in the right proportions. Calling it the best pirate film in the last ten to fifteen years is easy — the competition for that title, let's admit, was not the fiercest. But that's no longer "The Bluff's" problem. The map led where it promised. No one poured rum along the way, but we arrived at the destination, and that's already a lot.