Another disappointment

Rating: 3/10 (15 February 2009)

I'll give Blood Diamonds a 3 for the visuals but everything else about this film, from the script, to the "acting", to its themes were just plain bad.
Going in, I thought this was going to be a thinking man's movie, but all I got was a young boy (Leo) trying to play a grown up bad boy by growing a face full of beard and putting on a god-knows-what accent (Is it African? Australian? British? Who knows!). Leo is one of the most overrated actors of all time. He was great in Basketball Dairies and Titanic but he CANNOT play a tough guy and certainly not one that needs an accent. Throughout this entire movie, he had one expression on his face for 95% of the time, and that was his "oh I'm really serious and quite angry" look. That's NOT acting, there's no range, no emotion, he's just frowning his face and delivering his lines while moving his eyeballs and looking away from the camera for a slight variation so hopefully the audience doesn't get bored.
Then Connelly's character, a "journalist", suddenly appears at the right spot and blooms this one dimensional relationship with Leo in a matter of a few hours. The two of them go on a little "adventure" in the outback of Africa. First of all, what newspaper/magazine operation would send a woman like that on her own in the middle of a warzone without any restrictions whatsoever and allow her to go anywhere she wishes? Second, was there even a point to her character other than to add cliché romance and tell us that this white woman isn't a bad person but she cares about what she's writing (like it would have went down any other way).
This movie didn't know what it wanted to be. One moment it was comedic, the next it was a drama with some lame-forced romance added in. Suddenly out of nowhere roll into this shaky-cam, 3 seconds per shot-sequence that looks like it was taken out of a Borne movie. It is riddled with one coincidence after another. In one scene Leo's character somehow finds Connelly character after escaping from a warzone in which every civilian including local soldiers all died in. In the next scene, you have the father being locked out of a refugee camp filled with a million people then out of nowhere the family he has desperately searched for magically appears right infront of him. Wow! What are the odds? When our three main "heroes" are lost in the woods they somehow end up in the backyard of a friend's house whose sole purpose was to give cliché lines about life, morality, death and righteousness then eventually get shot to give the script some "dramatic" effect.
This is nothing more than an Oscar bait with a huge budget and a stinker of a script. Is it really about blood diamonds? No, this "romance/action" film could have had any other backdrop and it would have turned out the exact same way. I'm very disappointed by this film. It's the type of movies that come out these days with a lot of hype but absolutely nothing to back up for it. Sure you have starpower with a controversial hot topic but that alone does not make a movie decent. If they only made a movie about AFRICANS and kept it about the BLOOD DIAMONDS then you'd have had a much better film, but of course this is Hollywood, so if the film does not contain big stars with sex appeal the studio wouldn't have okay'ed it.