Blood Diamond

Political films have never interested me. They spend little time developing the characters because they are trying to develop their agenda. Blood Diamond is an exceptional action/adventure story that gets caught up in an average political film.

The film takes place in Africa in the year 1999, when there was a global debate over the diamond trades there. Diamonds were traded for weapons to fuel the civil war. Many people lost there lives, and limbs. Djimon Hounsou plays Solomon Vandy, a man who’s enslaved by African rebels to harvest diamonds after being torn from his family. Solomon finds a huge diamond while digging and buries it right before the rebel base is raided by soldiers, who apprehend him. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, a diamond smuggler with no heart. Archer is taken in for smuggling diamonds and meets Solomon in prison, where Archer hears of Solomon’s enormous rock and begins to lick his lips. The two men form a union when Archer promises to reunite Solomon with his family, but is only thinking of how he will lift the rock from him. Maddy Bowen, an American journalist played by Jennifer Connelly joins up with the duo. She uses her pass as a journalist to get the group through hard to reach territories. Connelly’s performance is less than par, or maybe it just seemed that way because she was wedge between two great performances from the leading men. Both Hounsou and DiCaprio earned Oscar nods for their roles, and both were deserved, although DiCaprio may have been more deserving for The Departed, a far superior film and performance.

Edward Zwick directs some suburb action sequences that are very thrilling and edge of your seat. And the film is better than the typical thrill-a-minute action film, at least it has some substance, but it focuses on the wrong things. It would have worked better if it had focused on the characters first and the diamond trade second, and not vice-versa. The plot is very stop-and-go, and the compassionate, dramatic dialogue doesn’t always mix well with the bloody action. This is a movie that needed just to focus on its characters more and on too many things less.

Other films from Edward Zwick:
Glory(1989), Legends of the Fall(1994), The Siege(1998), The Last Samurai(2003)

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