BLOOD DIAMOND wants to be so many things, including an action film, an adventure epic, a love story, and an indictment of what soulless exploitation has done to Sierra Leone. It takes 2 ½ hours or so, but still doesn’t have the emotional tug that it should by the time the final credits roll.
Set in 1999, it starts with a group of official looking folks in expensive suits debating the human cost of the diamonds on the market. These so-called, and eponymous, blood diamonds are being collected by very unsavory people who exploit their fellow Africans in very unsavory ways. How unsavory is soon spelled out in the person of Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a poor but noble fisherman who dreams of his son becoming a doctor. In short order, the local revolutionaries have swept through Solomon’s village, killing almost everyone except the Vandy family. Wife and kids flee into the jungle and Solomon is conscripted to dredge the diamonds that will fund the revolution. That story is on an intersecting course with that of Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a self-styled soldier of fortune who runs diamonds to anyone who will buy them. Luck, good and bad, brings them together.
Good luck. Solomon finds a pink diamond as large as a hen’s egg and spirits it into the bush. Bad luck, one of his guards, the one who shoots people without giving it any thought, sees him. Good luck. The government forces swoop in just as Solomon is about to be shot. Bad luck. He ends up in the same prison as the guard, who bellows out his name and demands the diamond. Good luck. Danny is in the same prison, hearing this, somehow frees Solomon while getting himself out of the pokey as well. Bad luck. Good luck. It rains down on them freely, as do volleys of gunfire and with alarming regularity.
Naturally everyone wants that big pink diamond for all sorts of reasons, even the intrepid lady reporter, Maddie Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) who latches onto Danny in order to break the story of where blood diamonds come from. Why Danny tells a total stranger what he does for a living almost as soon as meeting her is problematical. The film has already solidly established that he is the ideal anti-hero, slick, smart, amoral, and, when necessary, charming. That relationship leads to a romantic subplot that is not just unnecessary but positively irksome, rife as it is with expository dialogue conceived as series of lectures rather than conversations, and of personal revelations that fall flat from the lack of chemistry between these two. Then again, this is a film that is plotted around the issues that it wants to illuminate, not a storyline as such. Rogue military officers running troops like their own private army, boy soldiers kidnapped and indoctrinated in a sort of “Lord of the Flies” montage, revolutionaries chopping off the limbs of innocent villagers, and refugee camps where the inhabitants are treated somewhere between victims of and suspects in the anarchy around them by the aid organizations in charge. The result is that these characters aren’t the icons they might have been had the scripting not let them down at every turn, instead they are clichés, right down to the requisite conversation between Solomon and Danny about why Danny doesn’t want a family and why that is so confusing for Solomon. The film is full of moments such as that, be it a city under fire that is a pale imitation of similar sequences in BLACK HAWK DOWN, or that maddening interlude when an encampment full of bloodthirsty revolutionaries armed to the teeth proves to be no match for one white guy, that would be Danny, with an automatic weapon and the chutzpah to take them all on at once.
DiCaprio, even then, gives a fine performance, cocksure and cool in the face of anything the times can throw at him, gamely, if not successfully, attempting the rubbery South African and patois accents required. His face, while still boyish, takes on a distinctly hard cast. He’s absolutely convincing as someone for whom life is cheap, his own being maybe the cheapest. It’s Hounsou, though, who transcends the words he’s given to mouth and situations he’s given to act. They may be hackneyed, but he himself is full of dignity, with a heart so boiling over with rage and with sorrow that it is the one thing that rings true in what is otherwise a pedantic lesson intended to instruct and to improve the viewer.
Ultimately BLOOD DIAMOND raises ire and evoked sympathy for the victims of exploitation who are caught in the crossfire of greed, sometimes literally. But it’s a strictly intellectual enterprise, for all of Hounsou’s magnificent effort. His is a performance that, like the issues raised, is worth remembering. In fact, they are the only two things that are.
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