Blood Diamond (2006)
Directed by Edward Zwick
An ex-mercenary turned smuggler. A Mende fisherman. Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed countrywide.
24 connections found
View:
24 films that influenced Blood Diamond
What critics say influenced Blood Diamond
Meanwhile, DiCaprio's South African fortune hunter Archer meets his match in humanitarian reporter Maddy (Connelly); it's the kind of dead weight from which flaccid romantic misadventures are made and reminds, if anything, of Joaquin Phoenix's cameo in Hotel Rwanda as a ventriloquist dummy for the filmmaker's belated activism.
Blood Diamond brings to mind the simplified treatment of worldly tragedies in the same line as Hotel Rwanda, but whereas the latter was merely watered down and overly polished, the former is outright clueless in both content and execution.
Zwick appears to want to make another Hotel Rwanda (2004) -- or at least something along the lines of Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener (2005) -- when, in fact, his story is more like a politically conscious King Solomon's Mines with doses of Hemingway thrown in.
It is possible to build affecting, responsible dramas around horrific real-life events, as Terry George and Michael Winterbottom have with, respectively, "Hotel Rwanda" and "Welcome to Sarajevo."
Thoughts of 2004’s Hotel Rwanda zipped through my head as I watched Blood Diamond.
In the process, the movie rubs our faces in violence, actually outdoing such recent films as "Beyond Borders," "Hotel Rwanda," "The Constant Gardener" and "The Last King of Scotland" in portraying Africa as a scary, apocalyptic hell on earth.
A subtle reference to John Huston’s "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" in the film’s climax puts a grace note on the trajectory of Danny Archer’s value system.
This is all a lot for one movie to do -- especially one that's also wants to be "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" -- and it might have been better if Zwick had dropped a few massacres and spent more time developing his secondary characters and making his transitions more credible.
Ripping off -- or at least borrowing heavily from -- the ending of The Constant Gardener and having DiCaprio do a bit of Gary Cooper from the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) don't really change what the story is really about.
The opening (a match is struck in the darkness) is very trite, but the face that emerges belongs to Djimon Hounsou, the gifted column of muscle who lent Steven Spielberg's Amistad what Woody Strode lent John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge.
Advertisement
Throughout, echoes of past Hollywood movies (from "Casablanca" to "The Defiant Ones") reverberate.
Plus, the relationship of Hounsou's character with Danny Archer is well-developed and demonstrates that, yes, we actually have made some strides in this old world, since the two characters' fates in Blood Diamond are essentially a reversal of those of the title character and his black gun bearer in Trader Horn (1931), the granddaddy of all African adventure pictures.
It is possible to build affecting, responsible dramas around horrific real-life events, as Terry George and Michael Winterbottom have with, respectively, "Hotel Rwanda" and "Welcome to Sarajevo."
Edward Zwick channels Phillip Noyce’s Clear and Present Danger in crafting scenes of anxiety-ridden peril.
Advertisement
In the process, the movie rubs our faces in violence, actually outdoing such recent films as "Beyond Borders," "Hotel Rwanda," "The Constant Gardener" and "The Last King of Scotland" in portraying Africa as a scary, apocalyptic hell on earth.
As an entry in the advocacy-entertainment genre, in which glamorous movie stars bring our attention to the plight of the less fortunate, "Blood Diamond" is superior to 2003's ridiculous "Beyond Borders" while looking strident and obvious next to last year's "The Constant Gardener."
Corruption, murder and civil war in Africa at the hands of rebels/international companies/governments can make compelling viewing in the hands of the right film maker (Cry Freedom, Hotel Rwanda and The Constant Gardener, etc).