Clichéd nonsense......

Rating: 3/10 (5 February 2007)

Having read many other reviews of Blood Diamond on this site, I feel compelled to post my own. It seems everyone who viewed this film was blinded by Leonardo's highlights. Hollywood rarely deals with Africa well when depicting it on celluloid. Blood Diamond is a showcase for a strained and showy performance from Dicaprio. The illegal diamond trade became merely a backdrop for several Rambo like action sequences. Anyone viewing this film with little knowledge of African people would come away thinking they are mostly bloodthirsty diamond grabbing savages. The simplistic portrayal of Djimon Honsous' character does little in humanizing the African for the viewer. Yes, he is an honest fisherman and loves his family, yet he is still merely a prop with minimal depth. Honsou is an accomplished actor who comes through the best with the worst material.
In a scene where Jennifer Conollys' journalist character questions why she is bothering to illuminate the atrocities carried out in Guinea and Sierra Leone, she states that her story could just turn in to an infomercial like the ones depicting starving African children with bloated bellies. The irony was all too much. While highlighting such stereotyped representations of Africans by the media, the film itself did not escape such pitfalls. It was guilty of the very same tired African representations it claimed to be distant from.There were also numerous aspects of the plot that defied logic and common sense that i will not get in to here. The movie was also far too long capped by a preposterously melodramatic finale. It seems the exploitation of the Africans to sell products to the west continues, this new product is called Blood Diamond.