Leo DiCaprio plays a soldier of fortune who discovers morality

Rating: 7/10 (26 December 2006)

Based on the trailer, I really didn't expect much from this movie  lots of action maybe but not a whole lot more. Wrong. It's a good enough flick, long on action to be sure. But, beyond that, based on what I've read, it is a more-or-less accurate depiction of circumstances during the on-again-off-again civil war that played out in Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2002.
During that terrible time, hundreds of thousands of ordinary peasant citizens were slaughtered and exploited by armed rebel militias, principally cadres of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), and also by government forces supposedly charged to protect these folks from the rebels. At the very least, many people found themselves lethally caught in a no man's land between the RUF and the Army. Refugees piled out of the most hotly contested areas and into holding camps.
The film narrative takes place in this context of violence and chaos. Danny Archer (Leo DiCaprio) is a renegade gun merchant and adventurer from Zimbabwe, on hand to make a buck selling weapons to the RUF. His love interest is American journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) but there isn't really any time for love or lovemaking between attacks in this Hell on earth. So one unexpected plus in the film is the downplaying of romance in favor of another form of bonding and fidelity. For that the partner of interest is not Bowen but a Mende tribe peasant fisherman, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou).
Vandy's village and family have been torn asunder by the RUF, who kidnap Vandy's young teen son Dia (Kagiso Kuypers) and turn him into a killer. An RUF cadre leader, nicknamed "Capt. Poison" (David Harewood), serves as Dia's mentor and father surrogate, supplying political guidance and, ironically, almost tender approval for Dia's increasingly brutal soldiering. Vandy himself is indentured by the RUF and supervised at gunpoint working on a crew of prisoners busily extracting diamonds from a jungle patch to finance the RUF cause.
Vandy escapes, he and Archer are unexpectedly thrown together, and, when Archer learns that Vandy has buried a gigantic diamond back in the jungle, he becomes Vandy's best buddy ever, vowing to lead Vandy to his family and the diamond, profits from which they will split. The trio of Archer, Vandy and Bowen plunge into an intensely contested battle zone, and the action sequences commence in earnest.
It's a match made in Heaven: Vandy and Archer, that is. They manage their characters' roles and increasingly interdependent relationship with great skill. I think DiCaprio has been growing lately into a first rate adult actor, based on his work here and in the recent Martin Scorsese film, "The Departed." He's bulked up physically and seems to have matured into manhood in his last two films.
At age 31, when these recent films were made, he's no longer the troubled kid of "Basketball Diaries," the unconvincing slick operator kid in "Catch Me If You Can," nor does he seem miscast as an adult, as he did in "The Aviator." Granted, his characters in "The Departed" and "Blood Diamond" have much in common: in both DiCaprio is four parts whip smart toughness and one part tender vulnerability. But the point is that he has grown into such roles and performs them with aplomb.
The film suffers towards the end when Archer single-handedly takes on a huge RUF contingent plus a government attack force that Archer himself had called in on the rebels' stronghold. It's a page from Sly Stallone's book of go-it-alone guerrilla warfare. Having worked so hard and effectively to build a credible character capable of moral transformation, DeCaprio doesn't deserve this fatuous Hollywood fate. I do suppose that this one-man-standing-against-the-world-of-evil baloney sells theater tickets and DVDs. Sigh. Beyond this insult to our intelligence, the film is edifying, exciting and believable. My grades: 7/10 (high B) (Seen on 12/22/06)