The Russo brothers produce a swashbuckling and often gory tale of 19th-century buccaneers in the Caribbean

In a recent interview to promote her new film The Bluff, Priyanka Chopra Jonas put her pivot to Hollywood down to feeling “limited” by the Bollywood industry that first made her a star. In the decade since she began focusing on American film roles, it’s been hard to work out exactly what Chopra Jonas was being held back from. Aside from an acclaimed turn in 2021’s Bafta-nominated The White Tiger, the actor and sometime Pitbull collaborator has generally favored mindless, straight-down-the middle entertainment such as the Céline Dion-centered romcom Love Again and the insipid spy series Citadel. I couldn’t get through the pilot of the latter, but it is Amazon Prime’s second most-watched show of all time.

The Bluff marks a return to Chopra Jonas in action heroine mode, 10 years after her western breakout TV show Quantico. The twist? This time, she is a 19th-century pirate. Her character Ercell “Bloody Mary” Bodden grew up sailing the seven seas, but when we meet her she has long left her swashbuckling ways behind her. She lives an idyllic life on Cayman Brac, settled in a town with conch shell-lined walkways and where her neighbors happily cook up turtle soup for their colonial masters. She can still jerryrig a machete in five seconds flat, but these days it is used to chop down coconuts for her young family. Ercell is anxiously waiting for her husband TH (The Rings of Power’s Ismael Cruz Córdova) to return from sea, not knowing that he has been kidnapped by captain Connor (Star Trek’s Karl Urban), her former mentor and one of the most fearsome pirates of them all.