This is Africa

Rating: 8/10 (7 February 2007)

I always thought of Leonardo DiCaprio as a bit of a 'twit', as the English say. But I must admit, I believed every second of his portrayal of Danny Archer, the un-PC Rhodesian mercenary. More than I believed any of the other characters, except maybe Arnold Vosloo. In fact, DiCaprio was the character that turned this super-PC movie into something that went beyond that and thereby, and despite its "I'm Important!"-shouting ending, made it into a 'good' movie.
Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounsou were burdened with lines so loaded with 'message' that it was almost cringe-factor-10 material. That they managed it to deliver most of them without me wanting to duck every time one of those lines was coming, is a testament to their skill. But in the end it was DiCaprio's sustained characterizationand accent!that kept it all going.
Blood Diamond, whose best and most enduring lines were those relating to the acronym 'TIA' (This Is Africa), wears the 'important' label like a General wears his decorations. Still, its impact is lost in overkill. The same movie without the message-bits would have been simply superb. And without that hokey ending, of course. Does anybody really believe that this trade is ever going to stop? Does anybody really believe that the true evildoers are the traders, middle-men, corrupt government officials, local potentatesand not the ultimate buyers themselves: the people of small minds and/or stupid vanities? For the majority of these diamonds do not go to the rich and powerful, but to those who flood into the local cheap-special-offer jewelry store when the occasions for buying arise or are fabricated by the peddlers of the goods. Without customers there are no middle-men and peddlers turn their attention to something people will buy instead.
Apart from all that, let's look at another messages of this movie. One of them was that about the child-soldiers in Africa, and everywhere else, for that matter. The Hitlerjugend happened in the middle of Europe, rememberand there's nothing new about this anyway. When you need some killers and are running out of grown-ups, the young are the most impressionable and easiest to mold. Even volunteer armies consist mostly of those qualifying as 'young'and for good reasons, one of which is that in their brains one is more likely to find 'impressionability' and a lack of big-picture judgment. I believe the age of cerebral maturity is somewhere around the age of 25. Most soldiers are significantly younger than that.
So, nothing new about child-soldiers, and if anybody thinks that's going to change, think again. The point was that as a 'point' to be made in a movie, Blood Diamond practiced overkill. The same point was made with much more impact and much more to the gut in Tears of The Sun, when one of the team of SEALs, while interfering in some ethnic cleansing in the middle of the jungle, killed one of those in the process of some serious rape and violenceonly to find, to his horror that "He's just a kid. Just a fg kid!" The look on the soldier's face as he stared close-up at the face of the dying child-soldier he's just stabbed: that will stay with me forever. Related scenes in Blood Diamond I already have a problem recalling. But what I do remember about it are all scenes involving 'Danny Archer'which tells me something about the caliber of the actor who represented him.
Here we have the difference between bad and good story-telling. But, of course, Tears of the Sun was a flick about US soldiers having a conscience and one with Bruce Willis at that. So it can't possibly have been as 'important' and was probably pure US Navy propaganda. Right? Never mind that it asked more questions per average minute of film than Blood Diamond asked in an hour. It's just that they weren't shoved into your face with a "Look here! Important stuff coming up!" Ignoring the gratuitous proselytizing this was a damn good movieand thanks to DiCaprio for making it that way.