20 Recent Movies WAY Better Than They Had Any Right To Be
3. The Bluff
Absolutely nothing about The Bluff suggested it to be anything more than yet another aggressively bland straight-to-streaming action-thriller, and while it was sloughed onto Amazon Prime Video rather anonymously back in February, it deserved a good deal more love than it got.
The big surprise of The Bluff is that this Priyanka Chopra and Karl Urban-starring romp is the rarest of things - a swashbuckling action-adventure film for adults, evidenced by its shockingly brutal violence.
There are extremely few pirate-themed films that aren't aiming at a four-quadrant audience, so it's enormously refreshing that The Bluff makes the most of its R-rated setup, all while delivering a pulpy, flavourful riff on the typical "retired gunslinger becomes an ass-kicker one last time" formula.
Chopra proves herself to be an action natural here, though it's Urban's deliciously scenery-chewing turn as the buccaneer antagonist that steals the show.
The Bluff is hardly reinventing the wheel, but there's far more here to savour than its mediocre marketing or low-key release would imply.