It Ain't 'Alf Noisy, Mum

Rating: 6/10 (15 May 2011)

We're in Africa. And there's bloody turmoil. The Blacks are misunderstood, repressed and exploited. The whites are either sleazy, oppressive exploiters or moralistic, meddlesome do-gooders.
Every black seems to own a Kalashnikov. And almost very black seems to be an utterly amoral, ruthless butcher. Except for the occasional saint, who even manages to shame the west by the whiteness of his conscience. How does such relentless savagery manage to give rise to such paradoxical paragons? This movie doesn't explain. And I, for one, wish it did.
The violence is relentless. And the sound-score is excessively LOUD. The movie moves from one set-piece shoot-em-up to another, with intervals of discursive calm between. DiCaprio et al seem to spend much of the time miraculously fleeing from one 'Saving Private Ryan' style hail of light ordnance to another, in progressively shabby vehicles. During the calms, this hero keeps (or loses) our attention by constant flights into furious rhetoric, mostly directed at his black associate.
The problem seems to be about diamonds. But it isn't really; it's about global Monopoly and how Africa was last in the game to throw a double-six, and been left with just the water-works. DiCaprio plays a man on a journey of discovery to a Damascus moment that seems to take forever arriving. Frankly, by the time it does, you will have experienced such a monotonous parade of brutality and slaughter that motives will have become lost in the fires, trampled underfoot, or washed away by blood.
It's a moral movie - like so many others - that seeks to point a simplistic finger of blame at the west for much of the dark continent's woes. Presumably, the west were to blame for what happened in Rwanda as well. And like so many others it fails to make its point with anything like the requisite intelligence and subtlety, relying too much upon graphic slaughter, moral cliché, and the popularity of its post-Titanic star. I actually preferred 'Tears Of The Sun', though all of these movies seem to suffer from weak endings.
Don't be fooled by the Oscar nominations, there are far more coherent movies in this genre that won't leave you suffering from tinnitus.