Too Distracted by its own Message

Rating: 6/10 (6 December 2006)

Blood Diamond reviewed by Sam Osborn
Films should be made to tell a story. For me, that's their only function, and it's a function that's beautiful and endless. A message film is a hindered film because it never keeps its eye on the ball. It's like taking a class where your professor is Miss Universe; your attention is directed to the right object, but never for the right reasons. In order for us to believe in a message, we must first believe in the story it has to tell.
The message in Blood Diamond, of course, has something to do with diamonds. The title, a delicious double entendre, refers to the pink hue of the diamond in question, and also to the blood spilled in trying to obtain it. The obtainer is Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a white Zimbabwean diamond smuggler with a South African background. His charge is to hunt the diamonds down, buy them for cheap, and hump them across African state lines to sell them for an illegal profit to Van de Kaap (Marius Weyers), a two-faced diamond retailer mirroring the real-life De Beers. The diamonds involved in this trade are known as conflict diamonds, since the groups that initially profit from the sale are warlords and rebel groups who force slaves to do the requisite mining for them.
Djimon Hounsou plays Solomon Vandy, a father stolen from wife and three kids to work as a diamond miner, sifting rocks from gems in a muddy West African river. He stumbles upon the blood diamond, burying it just before a happenstance government raid puts him in a Freetown jail. Also in this jail is Danny Archer, having been caught smuggling diamonds under the skin of a goat along Sierra Leonean border. When Danny gets word that Solomon knows of the diamond's hiding place, he spins a deal to bail both of them from prison. And because Danny owes a certain Colonel Coetzee (Arnold Vosloo) some lost diamonds and Solomon's still missing his family, the two have reason to go diamond-hunting. Jennifer Connelly works her way into the story as Maddy Bowen, the frustrated journalist looking for the inside scoop on the conflict diamond trade.
DiCaprio turns in a satisfyingly ironic performance here, seeming to exploit all the reasons people despised him in the first place. He plays a would-be fraternity brother who seems to have been accidentally born into African violence. He's an overconfident prick with just enough oil-slick charm and big-bulk intensity for us not to hate him. Connelly doesn't have much to work with, granted, but her sympathetic maternal stares at Hounsou could have been laced with more condescension. But then again, maybe not. Hounsou hammers out an affecting role from the little he has to work with. The man is best when screaming and barreling through in a blood-soaked fury, and Director Zwick gives him numerous reasons to do so.
Zwick's direction is lively and strong, giving Blood Diamond a much undeserved umph. But the screenplay devolves its characters into the African sob acts we've seen played out on the Hallmark Channel before: Connelly's American journalist looking to make a difference, DiCaprio's heartless cum last-second humanitarian, and Hounsou's sad African from infomercial land. And as many lines as they can spew on about the ignorance of certain first-world nations and the schmaltzy National Geographic articles cranked out each month, their own uselessness is always underlined by the film's paucity of power. The story turns like clockwork, all mechanical and repeated, because the characters seem always on the verge of looking straight into camera, asking for a tax-deductible donation to save the victims of the conflict diamond trade.
Samuel Osborn