While scrolling through movies to watch, I noticed The Bluff. It had Karl Urban and Priyanka Chopra Jonas in it, so how bad could it be?
Read on, dear Outposter, read on.
The Bluff is set sometime in the 1700s, I think. I was watching it while doing some work, and they had a flash card saying that. I’m going to say, it’s a movie set ‘in the days of pirates’, that’s cool pirates, not the ones that download cars and music.
Tick boxes at the ready, The Bluff had in the first 15 minutes:
- A PoC as the captain of a ship
- A stay-at-home mother
- A teenage daughter who is sleeping with a guy without mom knowing
- A young member of the family who’s disabled and in a wheelchair
There you go, that’s all you need to know about watching this movie. The rest of The Bluff is Chopra Jonas ‘girl bossing’ her way to fight Urban at the end. Guess who wins?
Boxes All Checked
I know there are records of PoC being captains of ships back in ‘the days of pirates’. Even though I rolled my eyes, I let it slide. I even let go of the stay-at-home mom, who struggles with being a homemaker.
I completely checked out at the disabled kid. Wow, that makes me sound like an arse! It was just, as the characters were being set up; the mom doing all the chores, the teenage daughter sneaking the guy into her room, the family missing the dad. I was still ‘on board’ this ship.
When the kid gets out of bed, picks up the crutch and calls to mom, I checked out! It got even worse. Later, the kid manages to escape a bunch of cutthroat pirates through a jungle, in a wheelchair. He had help from a guy, but I mean, come on.
This was worst that Leia in that Kenobi series. Any excuse to post this again.
Girl Boss, Girl Bossing
Yes, I thought The Bluff might be OK because of Chopra Jonas; she is a stunning, good-looking lady. You learn that she used to be known as Bloody Mary; I took this to mean that once a month, for 5 days, everyone on her ship was deathly scared of her.
However, they made her a girl boss and dialled it up to 11.
Not only is she a stay-at-home mom, who does the cooking, the cleaning, household chores and stays emotionally strong for her family; she can also kick ass!
She can take out at least 5 cutthroat pirates, even when she’s strung up. She can take a punch better than Jake Paul (bad example, but you know what I mean).
At one point, the band of pirates have the chance to shoot her, at about 20 feet away. There were more bullets flying than in a John Woo movie, and no one hit her!
In fact, in the setup, one of Urban’s men is a sniper. In the setup, the sniper can do a head shot, from about 3 miles away (it seemed), but now, shooting at a woman, he couldn’t hit Han Solo if he was sitting across the table from him.
Later in The Bluff, after saving her husband from the pirates, because men have to be rescued these days, she manages to rig a set of boobytraps that makes MacGyver look like an amateur.
The Ending Was A Surprise
That’s a lie, the ending wasn’t a surprise, it was about as predictable as me winning the lottery; I never will, as I don’t even buy a ticket.
You know that the amazing, brilliant, awesome Chopra Jonas will face off against the evil, nasty, and (probably) #MeToo character, Urban the pirate.
The ‘spectacular’ fight is on a cliff top and looks as fake Mickey Rourke’s plastic surgery.
Urban gets the upper hand; there seems to be no way out for the girl boss…is it all over? No, the teenage daughter shoots him, with the power of family, I mean, a gun.
The only thing that could have made it more cliché would have been if the disabled kid jumped out of his chair and roundhoused Urban off the cliff.
Overall
If you haven’t guessed by now, I wasn’t a fan of The Bluff. This was John Wick for the modern audience. There is no reason to watch this movie. It’s a tick box exercise to try and pander to the people who will never watch a movie like this, let alone like it.
The only good thing about this entire movie was Urban’s accent as a pirate. It drifted from Irish to the cliched Long John Silver version. I giggled at it a lot.
Apart from that, if you want to see the pure definition of a ‘girl boss movie’, you won’t see a better example until the next one. 0 stars.
