Blood Diamond

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connelly, Arnold Vosloo, David Harewood, Ntare Mwine, Michael Sheen, Stephen Collins, Kagiso Kuypers

Written by: Charles Leavitt and C. Gaby Mitchell

Directed by: Edward Zwick

Distributor: Warner Brothers Pictures

Rated: R

Even the harshest criticism of Blood Diamond washes away when honest human eyes view the atrocities it exposes to the commercial motion picture screen. The story is one predictable cliché after another. The characters are drawn in broad, simplistic strokes without much depth to them at all. The film could even be inadvertently exploiting the injustices on which it seeks to shed light. Even with all of this taken into account, no matter how often you see frenzied 12-year olds with semi-automatics opening fire on unarmed civilians, you never really get used to it. Director Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall) compellingly conjures images of terrifying, exquisite brutality in Blood Diamond.

Djimon Hounsou (Amistad, In America) stars as a fisherman named Solomon Vandy who is forcibly taken from his family by revolutionaries and forced to work the diamond fields in Sierra Leone. A government attack on the field frees him from slavery, but not before finding a massive, rare pink diamond he hides in the dirt. Now in order to get his family back he must help smuggler Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio, with a meticulously studied South African accent) find the jewel. When things get sticky, Archer calls on the help of journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly, as captivating as ever) and the three of them get pulled into the vicious turmoil of revolutionary 1990 Sierra Leone.

The performances here create the kind of depth you would expect out of actors of this caliber. Solomon Vandy would come across as remarkably flat were it not for the stubborn, unwavering strength with which Hounsou imbues him. As Archer, DiCaprio has to play an action hero with enough gravity to play around the emotional center of a contemporary political drama. He plays it expertly with only the tiniest hint of excess style. Between this and Gangs of New York, DiCaprio is edging ever closer to being the thinking person’s Harrison Ford. It would be all too easy to say that Connelly never reaches much as an actress, always playing different ends of the same basic character. But here we see her ratchet up her dramatic intensity as a tough, heroic journalist. In Blood Diamond, you see the kind of fire in Connelly’s eyes that you would see in the gaze of a young, intrepid foreign correspondent like Lara Logan if she’d spent time on a soundstage with David Bowie and a bunch of muppets in the mid-1980s. She’s very compelling in what turns out to be a disappointingly marginal role here.

A socially conscious Hollywood-style adventure/drama, Blood Diamond is a feverish mix of different cinema flavors. Surprisingly, Zwick juggles the many elements of the multi-genre project competently enough to make a solid, big-budget film that may appeal to a larger crossover audience than would normally be reached by a more artistically accomplished indie film. Mixing genres between serious drama and quickly paced adventure may not appeal to or satisfy everyone, but it’s an interesting enough project to be worth a look for anyone in the mood for something with more substance than anything else at the multiplex this month. (Come on – did you really want to see the sequel to Van Wilder?) Zwick and crew filmed on location in Sierra Leone and elsewhere in Africa with the help of local experts (including documentary filmmaker Sorious Samura) to develop a compelling film that feels startlingly authentic. VS