Well made with good performances. A film that makes you think while entertaining

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2010)

This was a film that I connected with, as with Hotel Rwanda and unlike Black Hawk Down. DiCaprio pulls off his finest performance ever and Djimon Hounsou is excellent. The film succeeds in being entertaining whilst showing the horrors of the Sierre Leone civil war, a subject which I knew nothing about. This was something I think Black Hawk Down failed at, it did de-glamorise violence but at the same time failed to engage me with the characters. Blood Diamond certainly does engage the viewer with the characters, and you do feel a genuine emotional attachment with DiCaprio and Hounsou's characters in particular at the end of the film. I fell for the film and by the end of it felt completely engrossed in the lives of the extraordinary people portrayed in it. There were also some really nasty but relevant issues brought up, war crimes, child soldiers, the reminiscence of the bitterness of white supremacy in Africa (from both points of view) and of course the main one- the trading of conflict diamonds.