Blood Diamond
Story by Charles Leavitt and C. Gaby Mitchell, screenplay by Charles Leavitt
Directed by Edward Zwick
Warner Bros.
2006
Rating:


A film of deep-seated hypocrisy, "Blood Diamond" lectures against the exploitation of Africa while simultaneously using the civil war-torn Sierra Leone of the 1990s as a backdrop for ticket-selling action sequences. "Blood Diamond" poses as a film of social conscience, but through its various explosions and forced romance, the movie is obviously more concerned about tuning a profit, making it no better than De Beers, an alleged purveyor of conflict diamonds.

Reprising the same role he has played in "Amistad," six episodes of "ER," "Gladiator," "The Four Feathers" and "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider — The Cradle of Life," Djimon Hounsou is again cast as a tragic noble savage who helps morally ambiguous white characters find redemption. Here he's Solomon Vandy, a man forced to sift for diamonds that are sold by the savagely depicted Revolutionary United Front to European diamond dealers to fund their weapons. Solomon manages to find a valuable pink diamond and hides it away in hopes of using it to free his wife and daughter from a refugee camp and liberate his brainwashed son from the RUF. Rhodesian mercenary Danny Archer (Leonard DiCaprio) convinces Solomon to let him help in reclaiming the diamond, all the while intending to betray Solomon. Predictably Danny will eventually come to the side of good, but only once his choice is deprived of significance. Because no movie about Africa is complete without one, American reporter Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) arrives to lecture Danny about manipulating Solomon's tragedy for his own gain while photographing Solomon for her newspaper as he howls outside of a refugee camp.

"Blood Diamond" uneasily attempts to marry its message with pop sensibilities, overburdening the preachy narrative with redundant and less than thrilling action sequences that place a higher premium on the white characters' danger than on the Africans dying around them. Kanye West proved a fusion of social conscience and mainstream entertainment was possible with his 2005 single "Diamonds of Sierra Leone", yet when "Blood Diamond" tries to do the same, it betrays its noble intentions. The difference is that "Blood Diamond" — with its emphasis on white heroism and relative indifference to African slaughter — doesn't care about black people.

Posted Friday, January 5, 2007

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/blood.diamond