Directed by Frank E Flowers | Written by Flowers and Joe Ballarini | ▲▲1/2 | Prime

It’s not often these days we get a pirate movie, despite the broad cultural affection for The Pirates of Caribbean franchise. If you want to know why, ask Renny Harlin about Cutthroat Island or Roman Polanski about Pirates — wildly expensive movies, poorly reviewed and received. These pictures are a gamble. And to this movie’s credit, it’s not trying to offer a Jack Sparrow clone — this isn’t a family friendly picture, it’s violent with plenty of blood and brutality.

Priyanka Chopra Jonas is Ercell, a mother with a secret past living on a rocky Caribbean island, caring for her differently abled son, Issac (Vedanten Naidoo), and sister-in-law, Elizabeth (Safia Oakley-Green). They’re all waiting for her sailor husband, TH (Ismael Cruz Cordova) to return from sea, but he’s weeks late. When he arrives he’s in shackles, captive of Captain Connor (Karl Urban, relishing the villain role) and Quartermaster Lee (a charismatic Temuera Morrison, who you wish had more to do). These pirates are on a mission to find Ercell, who used to be one of them. They know her as Bloody Mary, a killer, capable of anything, including having stolen their gold.

This is a really promising scenario, and a script more interested in exploring it would’ve allowed for more scenes of people speaking to each other, but at its core this is an action picture, and that’s what it does best. Chopra Jonas is pretty impressive in sequences of hand-to-hand combat, and Urban is convincing with the cutlass.

And don’t mistake what it’s offering as having much in the way of depth, but we get moments, like when the truth of Ercell,’s past is revealed TH has an opportunity to judge her, but he doesn’t. The actors sell their intimacy: there’s no shame in what she had to do to survive. There’s certainly no shame in her protecting her family and killing a whole lot of pirates.

So, this is a pretty good time for a Straight-to-Prime movie, but it deserves to walk the plank for its many absolutely abysmal digital backgrounds.

Scenes shot on some tropical beach are intercut with scenes obviously shot in studio against a digital screen, and the ridiculous artificiality of that decision takes you right out of the movie. It’s egregious in scenes set in a cave network beneath the island, where the production wouldn’t pony up for anything more than poorly lit, cheap and unconvincing rock faces, but it’s much worse in the exteriors — the finale takes place on the edge of the titular bluff, and it’s truly awful, almost as bad as similar scenes in Send Help.

When did filmmakers in Hollywood decide these kinds of cost-cutting measures work? The action genre trades on authenticity — you’ve got to believe the scenario. If you don’t even believe the location, everything else falls apart. Buy a plane ticket and send your cast and crew to Mexico, Jamaica, or maybe even Florida. Shoot your movie in real places!