GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 11/28/06)

Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but they can be a country's worst enemy. Several times in the course of director Edward Zwick's Sierra Leone-set action adventure picture Blood Diamond, the point is made that the more exploitable "resources" an African country is found to have, the more suffering that country's population will undergo, as its labor force as well as its resources are exploited. That this should not be the case is a given. That Blood Diamond penetratingly, and sometimes punishingly, shows precisely how this is the case without ever turning into some kind of lecture is its triumph.

The picture's story, which is credited to Charles Leavitt and C. Gaby Mitchell and was made into a screenplay by Leavitt, is so obvious in presenting its theme's opposing perspectives by pairing a hero with an antihero that it should be laughable. Diamond's noble protagonist is Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou, in a performance that goes way beyond the plastic sainthood lesser actors would settle for), a humble Sierra Leone fisherman whose biggest priority in life is getting his preteen son properly schooled so he can have a better life. This ambition is violently disrupted by rebels in Sierra Leone's late-'90s civil war, who wrest Vandy from his family and force him to mine for precious stones. Vandy finds, and hides, a very out-of-the-ordinary rock, before the mining operation is busted by the legitimate Sierra Leone government and Vandy, along with his coworkers, is jailed. Diamond's bad boy looking for a shot at redemption (although of course he doesn't know it) is Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio, bringing both his scraggly beard and emotional dislocation from The Departed, to excellent effect), a cheerfully amoral Rhodesia-born smuggler who takes the ill-gotten gains of the Sierra Leone thugs into Liberia, the better for a big diamond conglomerate to cover its corrupt tracks. Archer's a first-class opportunist who jumps on Vandy when he hears tell of the fisherman's find while stuck in the same jail. For Vandy, the pink stone he's stashed away is a ticket out of misery for his family; for Archer, it's a ticket out of an increasingly dangerous and unrewarding game. Archer has to make a partner out of Vandy, and then, to get to where they both need to go in order to dig up the diamond, make an accomplice out of the investigative journalist (Jennifer Connelly) who's doing a story on the dirty dealings of the diamond trade.

With its astonishingly dark, whiplash-inducing action scenes bearing down on the audience almost constantly, Blood Diamond often plays more like a cynical '60s sub-equatorial adventure pic than the sort of geopolitical do-gooder epic that one might expect of Zwick (The Siege, Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai). And that's a good thing. Not that Diamond skimps on the social commentary; far from it. But it makes its points without too much breast-beating, caching its polemic within a tough-minded entertainment.

— Glenn Kenny