Diamond Blood
DIR: Edward Zwick • WRI: Charles Leavitt • PROD: Gillian Gorfil, Marshall Herskovitz, Graham King, Darrell Roodt, Paula Weinstein, Edward Zwick • DOP: Eduardo Serra • ED: Steven Rosenblum • DES: Dan Weil • CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Djimon Hounsou, Jennifer Connelly

The artificial emotion of Oliver Stone's World Trade Centre showed how horribly over-the-top wrong a movie can go when it carries the director's politics. Blood Diamond hopes to be an exception to the rule, mixing its politics with an engaging story. However, a wooden turn from Jennifer Connelly's stock journalist-who-cares, some unnecessary boardroom scenes of a G8 that wants to make a difference, and a heavy-handed preachy script threaten to upturn the boat early on.

Lucky for Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou signed on to star. Their burgeoning camaraderie onscreen is a pleasure to watch, and DiCaprio in particular nails a performance worthy of that elusive golden statue. Solomon (Hounsou) is the lynchpin of the tale; his village was destroyed by attacking rebels who took him as a slave to the diamond mines, sent his wife and daughters into exile, and drew his young son under their command. While Solomon just wants to find his son, Archer (DiCaprio) is a mercenary smuggler who wants to leave Africa a rich man. Both their goals can be accomplished by reaching a pink diamond Solomon found and hid during his stint of forced labour in the mines.

The first world is being regularly (and justifiably) chided on film – Syriana, Paradise Lost, etc. – and another movie telling us how terribly we ravage our poorer neighbours may seem excessive. We see a war-torn Sierra Leone destroying generations of youth in the battle for control of the diamond mines. While this happens, a couple in London buy an engagement ring from a merchant, choosing not to know that rocks bought from bling-free Liberia are really 'blood diamonds' from their warring neighbour. This not just a story that needs to be told, but one injected with such thrill and suspense that you hardly realise you are being preached to.

This underlying morality pulses through every scene. We are culpable in Solomon's son's capture and the destruction of his innocence, in his wife's internment in a refugee camp, in Archer's brutal willingness to sacrifice decency for the sake of money, in the reduction of a great continent to a fractured mix of jigsawed civil wars, and most of all in the enforced price wars for African resources.

Consumers are encouraged to buy 'conflict-free diamonds' at the end of the movie, but how is this possible if all that the film says is true - that conflict diamonds are smuggled across borders to be transported from other countries free from blood, and that dirty diamonds are mixed with clean ones? The fact is that, faced with such bloodshed and horror, the choice for the consumer is a simple matter of conscience.

Though the direction is nondescript, it never offends, and the story is allowed space to develop - though it runs a little long. An actor's movie, Blood Diamond hits all the right notes of action and pace, while touching the conscience with some stinging indictments of world affairs. The seemingly improbably love story seems tacked on, but, cynicism aside, it illustrates the heart of the movie, summarised by a character commenting that when an act of love is performed by a 'bad' man, there is hope.

Rated 15A (see IFCO website for details)
Blood Diamond is released on 12th January 2007.
Blood Diamond – Official website