Within the first few minutes of The Bluff, Priyanka Chopra Jonas slices and dices, swoops down and slashes a bunch of buccaneers in a relentless, action-packed, adrenaline-pumping sequence. Except that her character is no ordinary damsel in distress and neither is this a regular home invasion. The men who break in aren’t your streetside thugs either. They are, in fact, tied inextricably to Ercell Bodden’s past (Priyanka) and now stand to threaten her future.

For Ercell wasn’t always Ercell. Known as “Bloody Mary”, she grew up sailing the seven seas as a pirate but gave up her swashbuckling, edgy ways for a domesticated life in Cayman Brac. The invasion — in which Priyanka plunges into the blood and gore with both physical solidity and psychological grit — is just the beginning of the high-stakes action that defines this Frank E. Flowers-directed film.

Ercell soon discovers that her husband TH (Ismael Cruz Cordova), who she has been anxiously waiting to return from sea, has been kidnapped by captain Connor (Karl Urban), a fearsome pirate who also happens to be her former mentor. He is here not only for revenge, but also in the search of some stolen treasure that he is convinced she has taken.

It doesn’t take long for Ercell to swing back into being Bloody Mary once more. She gets into John Wick mode to fend off the enemy and save her family, which paves way for one well-choreographed action set piece after another.

But that is all that there is to The Bluff. The rest of the film, that is now streaming on Prime Video, is largely tedious and doesn’t have enough emotional heft to justify the how and why of its brutal action. The Bluff is a competent but generic action thriller, but the kind — given the lack of other elements needed to engage viewers — that will be discarded in a fill it-shut it-forget it manner as soon as the screen goes blank.

The biggest problem with The Bluff is that almost everything that you see in it has been done before, and perhaps even better. In terms of plot, the film has very little complexity and almost zero purpose. The dull dialogue and a feel that a lot of it is recycled entertainment repurposed in a package that ultimately falls through is what makes The Bluff a time-consuming and pointless exercise.

The only subversive aspect of this film — that marks Priyanka’s debut in Hollywood as a producer and is co-produced by the Russo Brothers’s AGBO, along with Amazon MGM Studios — is that it doesn’t paint pirates as heroes, even though it does invoke The Pirates of the Caribbean in the beginning. The pirates here — led by Connor — are far less romanticised. They want their marked gold bars back and are depicted here essentially as slaveowners and colonisers. Also, as mentioned above, this is a more or less cookie-cutter addition to the family protector action genre, and one that doesn’t throw up any real surprises.

The only one who powers The Bluff is Priyanka, who throws herself into the material, carving out one action sequence after another, as she battles on the ground, on a bike and even around crocodiles. Priyanka — after Quantico, Citadel, Heads of State and the like — has built a reputation for rising to the occasion and effectively kicking ass in a way that feels both convincing and cathartic.

However, the central emotional conflict of Ercell reconciling who she was with who she has tried to become never fully develops beyond the surface. The Bluff, too, settles into safe territory without attempting to examine its larger themes of identity, legacy and survival. While there is nothing wrong with having a straightforward action flick which promises nothing else, the biggest bluff of The Bluff is that it shies away and skims the surface just when you feel it is about to deepen.

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