Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle...

Rating: 6/10 (26 July 2010)

Films like this remind me why life is just one big ball of tragedy. It is very difficult to live life happily unless all these horrible facts of reality are summarily swept under the proverbial rug in our minds. Don Cheadle does a reasonably OK job in his role as the messianic hero, although his face is usually stamped with helpless despair most of the time, a lot of time the fact that he is acting oozes through the lens a little too intensely. The film tap-dances around the horrific violence going on in the periphery, there is minimal on-screen violence shown. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop and there be an actual depiction of the massacre going on. But, in the end, it was an attempt to shed some light on the Western world's indifference to the suffering of a split-off continent that is kept in captivity by the superpowers, kind of reminds me of the film "Martyrs", except in geographic terms, and applied to about 1 billion people in 54 countries. Now, the ridiculous thing about this movie, in my opinion, is how the main actor does this "heroic" thing for all the refugees, and yet ends up leaving his country and moving to Belgium, where it's all white and safe; again, the racial and economic split is created, but people swallow it easier since the actor is black, but the egregious disregard for human life is eternally stamped on the final message of this film... after all, who cares if 700,000 people lost their lives in this atrocious genocide, as long as the charismatic wealthy hero who knew all the right white guys comes out unscathed?