Unimpressive, loud, unmoving

Rating: 5/10 (23 March 2007)

Blood diamonds are pinkish in nature, and the term "blood diamond" refers to the blood spilled by those who were killed during its mining or transfer from the heart of Africa to stores around the world. That much I learned from the movie of the same name, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as an amoral smuggler who teams up with a native fisherman (Djimon Hounsou) and an American journalist (Jennifer Connelly). I also learned that huge multinational companies control the diamond market by hoarding all the diamonds. Actually, I knew that part already.
Denny Archer (DiCaprio) sells guns to rebels in Sierra Leone in exchange for diamonds, which he then turns over to a diamond cartel. Pretty nice gig, really, especially since apparently everyone in Sierra Leone is in on it except for the poor souls who have to mine the stuff. The revolutionaries rampage through villages, killing most of the citizens, including the women and children, and taking the men to work in the diamond mines. Some of the male children are taken to be "baby killers" among the rebels. So you see, everyone has a nice job.
Until the day that Solomon (Hounsou), mining in a creek for the rebels against his will, comes across a pink stone described as being about the size of a bird's egg. (It's never mentioned which bird, though.) As the rebels are being bombed by the government, Solomon buries the stone. But of course he's been spotted, and the rest of the movie is spent by everyone trying to get his or her hands on it to get out of Africa in one piece.
One of those people is Archer. At first you get the impression that he's sort of a summa-cum-Indy, an adventurer who looks like he's out for himself but deep down is a right respectable bastard who'll save a pretty girl and prevent an innocent man from being stabbed. Well, he's sort of that person, in that he'll save the pretty girl (Connelly), as long as he still gets his money. Kind of a low-rent Han Solo, really, only without the cool ride. At any rate, while in jail in Sierra Leone, Archer overhears a captured rebel commander accuse the also-imprisoned Solomon of hiding a big ol' diamond. And that, apparently, is all Archer needs to know, as he gets Solomon bailed out for the sole purpose of getting him to lead Archer to the diamond.
To accomplish this, Archer joins forces with Maddy (Connelly), a journalist looking for the real story of the rape of the African continent. She knows the diamond cartels are behind all the mayhem but can't print anything without anyone willing to go on the record with names and dates and other information. Of course, the swaggering Archer might be that person. Might they strike a deal? Oh, even better yet - perhaps they'll fall in love with each other, running through the jungles and plains? Leonardo DiCaprio could wear a four-foot beard and still look about sixteen years old. He can't disguise his youthfulness with a somewhat-acceptable Afrikaans accent (Archer is supposed to be from Rhodesia, aka Zimbabwe). And were we supposed to root for him or against him? In the hands of a skilled actor, ambiguous intentions can lend an air of mystery to a character, but it's a delicate chore; otherwise, you wind up not really caring if the guy's supposed to be good or bad. Such it is with Archer. I got it. He's in it for himself. Okay, I wondered, now what? Give me a reason why I should care if he dies, if all he's after is the diamond, no matter the cost of human life.
On the other hand, Hounsou is exceptional as a man who's quiet life has been incontrovertibly rent asunder by the invading rebel forces, which kidnap his son and turn him against his own people, and the government itself, which quarantines all refugees with the idea that it's too tough to tell which refugees are with the rebels and which are not. Having lost nearly everything save his own dignity, Solomon does not break, but bends when he must. His urgent need is to reunite with his family and restore order to their lives. Nothing else matters; he sees his diamond as a way out of everything.
Completing the troika is Connelly, who offers a somewhat distaff performance as the naive, unlikeable journo Maddy. Why would Maddy feel compelled to help Archer? Oh, that's right, he's Leonardo DiCaprio. The blunt sexual tension gets to be a bit too much at times; try to avoid screaming "oh, just get on with it, already!" at the screen. Connelly's done much better work than here, of course. It's just that she seems so listless, almost bored at times by the proceedings, like she can't quite believe she's in this junky, pseudoaction movie.
We're supposed to take away from this movie the central message that Diamonds Are Bad, at least if people died in order for them to make it to us. As soon as the movie came out, various diamond companies announced they were upstanding companies who'd never, ever do anything like this. I don't know what I should believe, because I've always sort of thought that buying shiny rocks was a dumb thing to do, anyway. But overall, the impression one gets is that this is just another dumb Hollywood message/action movie. A lot of the time, the scenes are basically people running from one explosion to another; luckily, the fine acting of Hounsou allows the audience to track what's going on rather effectively. And of course, in the end Things Are Solved, as I'm sure they are in real life.