Blood Diamond: Movie, DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray disc Review (2006)

8/19/2007 Posted by Admin

(Originally published Dec. 8, 2006)

Edward Zwick's "Blood Diamond" is a movie about the blood violence, enslavement of adults and children, and mass murder involved in the business of mining diamonds in Sierra Leone so fingers, necks and ears can look pretty elsewhere.

Set in 1999 during Sierra Leone's civil war, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Danny Archer, a South African diamond smuggler hustling jewels across the border to Liberia, which buys them for sale on the open market, thus allowing the army to purchase arms for their war.

It's this army that's responsible for pillaging villages and slaughtering most of its inhabitants. Those who are allowed to live are the fittest men, who are forced at gunpoint to sift the rivers for diamonds, as well as young boys, who are brainwashed into becoming killing machines.

When the army storms into one village and divides fisherman Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) from his family, the plot contrives to nudge him toward Archer, who wants the 100-carat diamond Vandy found (and hid) while working in the fields. Trouble is, Archer isn't the only person who wants that diamond--everyone does--which generates much of the film's manufactured conflict as the story unfolds.

Smoldering in a romantic subplot is Jennifer Connelly's Maddy Bowen, an idealistic journalist who believes that if people knew the brutality with which some diamonds are obtained, they wouldn't buy them. So, yes, she's annoyingly naïve, though her hopes are high for Archer to find his conscience and come through with the facts she needs to tell her story to the world--and thus, she believes, to change it.

What ensues is a beautifully shot movie with a terrific score by James Newton Howard that's sunk by formula and a bloated running time. It wants to be a political heavyweight that shakes people to take note of another side of Africa (as the movie notes, one's bling really is one's bling-bang), but since so much of it is overly familiar and predictable, none of it gels in a way that grips, surprises or resonates.

That said, the Academy Award-nominated DiCaprio is very good here, nailing a difficult accent and capping a fine year (see his Academy Award-worthy turn in "The Departed"), while Hounsou, once again typecast as the suffering face of Africa, digs deep to mine a fully realized character from Charles Leavitt's two-dimensional script. In the end, one suspects the film's subject matter won't appeal to a mainstream audience of consumers who would prefer no baggage attached to their bling, thank you very much. As such, the box office for this bauble looks dismal.

Grade: C+