Priyanka Chopra Jonas is to The Bluff on Amazon Prime, what Uma Thurman was to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Part 1: a blood soaked wife on a revenge spree.
The trick here is to ensure that the Shero’s presence is formidable, truculent, scorching, and sexy. Our Desi Girl scores on all four counts. She is a ferociously protective mother fighting off buccaneers on an island in the 1800s.
Admittedly, there is nothing particularly periodic about Priyanka’s presence. Her body language is timeless, and not in the classic sense. While she is not particularly convincing as a 19th century woman, she is absolutely dynamite as a vengeful vixen, negotiating her way through a maze of masculine mayhem on a breathtaking, beautiful, unspoilt sunkissed island invaded by plunderers who look like they could do with a collective bath.
In a manner, the fetching island could be seen as metaphor for the lead actress. Priyanka personifies the plunder pitch (and hell, life for a beautiful woman can be such a bitch). However, I seriously doubt screenwriters of this ‘Wacky Chan’ wunderblitz were seeking any metaphoric relevances in the islander’s version of a shootout Western.
This is the kind of slip-in-slip-out fare, bereft of heft, where the Shero is named Mary so that there can be ‘Bloody Mary’ allusions to her sanguinary state.
The Bluff is indeed a far more watchable and far less de-intellectualized fare than Priyanka’s last feature film Heads Of State which was so knuckle-headed it felt like a spoof (which it wasn’t).
There is subtle sense of spoofinness supplemented by a tongue-in-cheek spiffiness to the storytelling in The Bluff, a title that almost seems like an admission of a ravishing ruse, a bloodsoaked cruise, if you will. This is an embarrassingly straightforward vendetta flick with sustained splendidly shot action sequences where Priyanka’s Mary fights back when pushed to a corner.
Her frowning adversary , her near-nemesis, Conner is played by Karl Urban, a fascinating partly intimidating Madhavan lookalike who gives his enticing opponent as good as he gets.
There is a hasty history attached to Mary’s (Bloody or not) tempestuous tangle with Conner. And though she is a fiercely dedicated vengeful spouse, Mary doesn’t hesitate in admitting to her husband (Ismael Cruz Córdova) that there was bit of hanky-panky between Conner and she in the past.
All of these, shall we say, piracy prattle is played out by Priyanka Chopra with fetching self-assurance. She consistently puts her best foot, and profile, forward. Greg Baldi’s lensing does as much justice to Priyanka as it does to the scenic Australian landscape, a stirring mix of mystery and menace, that sadly doesn’t quite touch the characters.
However, The Bluff is huge fun while it lasts. The best thing to be said about Frank E Flowers’ direction is that he knows what he is doing. He is not in this to win an Oscar. Just to create a fun movie with a lead actress who is game.
