'Blood Diamond' is a better life lesson than it is a film
Earnest, engaged, compassionate and way too long at 150 minutes, Blood Diamond is probably not the kind of movie most of us feel like watching during the holidays but probably should, for our own good.
Directed by Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai, etc.), it follows last year's The Constant Gardener and this year's Catch a Fire as a docudramatic expose of horrible things happening in Africa, some of which are indirectly our own fault.
Blood Diamond focuses on two issues. One involves the so-called "conflict diamonds," smuggled into the international market by African warlords and bandits in order to buy weapons and fuel so they can put off making peace.
The other is the sad plight of the child soldiers - pre-pubescent boys kidnapped into service by those aforesaid warlords and bandits, issued cheap automatic weapons, pepped up with drugs and let loose in the countryside for generalized slaughter and atrocity.
To illustrate the story, Blood Diamond introduces an African Everyman named Solomon, played by African-born actor Djimon Hounsou (Amistad, Gladiator). A simple fisherman, Solomon only wants to support his wife and children and maybe send his son off to medical school one day.
Alas, the rebels pull into Solomon's village one morning, blasting everything to splinters with their AK-47s. They kidnap his family and put him to slave labor, sifting for diamonds in their mine.
Solomon manages to get loose, but not before he hides a gigantic "pink" diamond, worth a fortune. He's free, but his wife and daughter are locked up in a grim refugee camp and his son is off with the rebels. What can he do?
Then his story is discovered by Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio with a thick South African accent), an embittered gun runner who swaps diamonds for ordnance. Customs seized his last shipment, so Archer winds up owing his suppliers a lot of money. That big pink diamond could wipe out his debts. He sets out to help Solomon, for a price.
Along the way, the duo hook up with Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), an idealistic American reporter who's trying to crack the story on the diamond trade. It's hard since, as Maddy explains, African tragedies get maybe one minute on American cable news once in a while. (Blood Diamond is set in 1998, so Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky are the big news.)
Unlike The Constant Gardener, which was written by John le Carre, Blood Diamond doesn't carry any particular suspense. Will Solomon find his boy? Will Archer abandon his cynicism and racism at just the right moment to do the right thing? Is there any doubt here?
In its place, the movie offers lots of vistas of achingly beautiful, big-sky African scenery, lots of colorful crowd shots - the movie was filmed mostly in South Africa and Mozambique - and lots and lots of things that go boom.
Fans of Halo, however, will be disappointed by long, talk-filled sections where dialogue has to spell out the various social problems and how the international diamond cartel keeps the price of diamonds artificially high.
The attempted DiCaprio-Connelly matchup fails to strike any believable romantic sparks. The screenplay by Charles Leavitt (who wrote the lamentable K-PAX) is about as gripping as the average Sunday school lesson, with lots of tell-don't-show dialogue and a feel-good ending that's less convincing than Miracle on 34th Street.
Still, it's hard to dismiss a movie that's so well-intended - especially one that tries so hard to demonstrate how untrammeled forces are causing so much mayhem and misery in the less affluent corners of the globe.
As one poor villager in Blood Diamond, having barely survived yet another battle, remarks, "Let's hope they don't discover oil here. Then we'd have BIG problems."
movie review
'blood diamond'
Review: 2 1/2 (out of 4)
Rated: R, for strong violence and language
Run time: 150 min.
Ben Steelman: 343-2208
ben.steelman@starnewsonline.com