Leonardo DiCaprio puts a handsome face on an
ugly industry: in parts of Africa, diamond mining fuels civil warfare, killing
thousands of innocents and drafting preteen children as vicious soldiers.
DiCaprio (The Departed) plays Danny Archer, a white African soldier-turned-
diamond-smuggler who gets wind of a large raw jewel found by Solomon Vandy, a
native fisherman (Djimon Hounsou, In America) recently escaped from
enslavement by a brutal rebel leader. Archer offers a deal: he'll help Vandy
find his war-scattered family if Vandy will share the diamond with him. Drawn
into this web of exploitation is journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly,
Little Children), who agrees to help if Archer will tell her the details of
how conflict diamonds make their way into the hands of the corporations who
sell them to the Western world. DiCaprio is compelling because he never
flinches from Archer's utter ruthlessness; Archer ends up doing the morally
justifiable thing, but only because his desperate greed has led him to it.
Hounsou and Connelly, though saddled with all the moral and political
speeches, rise above the cant and keep the movie's treacherously formulaic
plot rooted in human characters. But in the end, the story won't stick with
you as much as the dead stillness in the child soldiers' eyes; the horror of
African civil strife refuses to be contained by Blood Diamond's uplifting
message--and the movie is all the more potent as a result. --Bret Fetzer