Reviewed - Blood Diamond:Ed Zwick's exposé of the conflict diamond industry, while worthy and well-meaning, works best as a traditional action-adventure yarn, writes Donald Clarke.
'I AM tired of writing about victims," Maddy Bowen, a foreign correspondent with Jennifer Connelly's porcelain complexion, says of her days working in Africa's trouble spots. "It might make a few people cry, and maybe one will even write a cheque, but it's not going to solve anything."
This may very well be the sound of Ed Zwick talking to himself. The director of such exercises in earnest liberal narcolepsy as Glory and The Last Samurai here takes on the dubious ethics of the diamond trade - in particular its support, indirect and otherwise, of corrupt regimes and murderously psychotic "rebels" - and, to his credit, reveals gruesome intelligence that may unsettle more than a few recently engaged couples.
But is Blood Diamond really any less patronising than Maddy's articles? Well, the film does dare to deal with the crimes Africans visit upon one another. After a clumsy sequence in which white men in suits, delegates to some international inquiry, explain the dynamics of the jewellery business to the audience, we watch as an honest fisherman from Sierra Leone and his hardworking son are abducted by self-proclaimed freedom fighters. The father, played with reliable dignity by Djimon Hounsou, is forced to forage for diamonds. The boy is trained as a killer.
The world of the film's black characters is characterised by an unchallenging binary morality. West Africa's indigenous people are either drug-crazed, gun-wielding lunatics or, like Hounsou's character, secular saints, unfamiliar with the concept of ethical compromise. Hounsou may be strong and stubborn, but he remains an archetypal noble victim of the white devil.
By way of contrast, Leonardo DiCaprio's Danny Archer, a cynical Zimbabwean smuggler who forms an uneasy alliance with Hounsou, is permitted to lie and steal without foregoing the possibility of redemption. Archer is, it is true, another type of archetype. Like Casablanca's Rick Blaine, he is a flawed cynic, destined - unless the projector goes on fire - to make a great heroic gesture just before the credits roll.
DiCaprio, who has grown up by playing characters who may, themselves, be decayed teenage cupids, grabs the part eagerly and clubs it into submission with a white African accent that could split anthracite. Whereas Hounsou comes across as a sub-clause in a characteristically pious Ed Zwick lecture, Leo appears to be moving through an old-fashioned romp by H Rider Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Thank goodness for that. With his help, Blood Diamond - morally commendable, structurally schematic - manages to escape its didactic ballast and deliver some solid, traditional adventure. There are worse things.
