A Worthless 'Diamond'

Rating: 5/10 (8 December 2006)

So halfway through "Blood Diamond" some guy gets shot -- it really doesn't matter who -- and somebody starts tending to the wound, and somebody else inquires after the fellow and this exchange occurs:
"How's his pulse?"
"I can feel it sometimes."
Right there is just about the most positive thing that can be said about this nitwit, sanctimonious, overblown picture. A thriller about the nexus between the diamond trade and Africa's never-ending wars, it's part action film, part buddy movie, part love story, part political tract and, in sum, much less: a meandering, preachy, condescending mess that only occasionally bursts into life and even then at such a tepid level that you can hardly call it living. As a social-conscience film, "Blood Diamond" demonstrates the worst sort of hypocrisy, straining to incorporate trite lectures about so-called "conflict diamonds" -- raw stones used by governments, warlords and rebels to purchase armaments -- while treating ordinary Africans in one moment like noble savages and in the next like cartoonish clowns out of a Three Stooges movie. Time and again, the film's white characters -- a soldier of fortune turned diamond smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio), the world's stupidest journalist (Jennifer Connelly), a holier-than-thou ambassador (Stephen Collins) -- make grand speeches about how the selfish indifference of westerners leads to the suffering of innocent Africans. And then comes a scene like the one in which a threatening group of tribesmen are disarmed by a pretty white girl with a camera who wants to take their picture -- a moment of racist caricature that would make the ghost of Stepin Fetchit squirm. The context of this harebrained seesawing between the moralizing and demoralizing is a thriller about the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s, which was fueled in part by the sale of conflict diamonds. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a proud and decent fisherman, is separated from his family in the unrest and forced into slavery in a diamond mine. He finds a rare pink diamond the size of a peach pit and spirits it away, becoming the centerpiece of a chase involving the smuggler, the journalist, government troops, an army of mercenaries and a rebel militiaman who has captured Solomon's oldest child and turned him into a drugged killing machine. Director Edward Zwick ("Glory," "Courage Under Fire," "The Last Samurai") mounts some impressive action sequences: battles in dilapidated cities and shantytowns and chases through jungles. And DiCaprio acquits himself quite well with a broad Rhodesian accent and despite a completely stereotypical character. But Hounsou is once again forced to carry the burden of white men's guilt as a man of almost comically unsullied honor, and Connelly is awful, just awful, as the type of only-in-the-movies journalist who gets stories by flirting with sources. Look, there's no doubt that the resources of Africa have been exploited at the dear expense of the people of that benighted continent. And diamonds may in fact be the least of it. But this is the type of material best dealt with in a documentary such as "Darwin's Nightmare" or "Black Gold," or in a melodrama populated by actual human beings such as "The Constant Gardener." Here, by attempting to thrill us with bang-bang action, Zwick and company seem to want to distract us from their message. And when they finally deliver it, their ham fisted treatment absolutely kills it.