War is hell in Africa

Up until its last five minutes you could almost convince yourself Blood Diamond is one of those great Hollywood romantic adventure yarns set in exotic locales, something like a Casablanca for the noughties, but with a higher body count.

Its Zimbabwean hero Danny Archer, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, calls himself a soldier of fortune but he’s really a diamond smuggler. In 1999, blood diamonds were being illegally traded out of Sierra Leone to finance the savage civil war ravaging the country.

Danny becomes involved with an idealistic American journalist, Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connolly), and a poor local fisherman, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), who’s desperate to find the wife and children he lost following an attack on his village by the Revolutionary United Front.

The level of graphic violence, much of it against women and children, soon suggests the movie aims to be something more serious than, say, another Indiana Jones yarn.

Blood Diamond‘s most disturbing elements involve boy soldiers who, like Solomon’s son, are forcibly indoctrinated and become intoxicated with the power of the weapons they are handed and the drugs used to brainwash them.

Danny and Solomon are linked by a huge diamond Solomon has found -“ Solomon realises Danny has the connections to find a buyer for it.

Maddy impulsively offers to help them retrieve the diamond from its hiding place. She hopes to use Danny’s information to expose the complicity of Western nations in the illicit diamond trade.

The movie doesn’t seem to make much of a point of it but Maddy’s idealism is compromised somewhat by her willingness to sleep with a source to get her story and to exploit the poor Africans by photographing their suffering. It doesn’t help that Connolly is delivering one of the most unconvincing performances seen by an Oscar winner in a long time.

If you hate DiCaprio you can skip this paragraph. With his looks and charm, he could have played Danny as a lovable rogue but instead he epitomises sleaze from his very first scenes.

He’s convincing as an action hero in the breathtaking action sequences -“ one of the major reasons to see Blood Diamond. Then in the last third of the movie he emerges as a fully rounded character, even making us care about his romantic connection with Connolly.

Hounsou as Solomon is saddled with the noble African role, delivering the big speech that ends the movie. After the cynicism displayed by just about everyone else in Blood Diamond, including its director, it’s hard to swallow such a rosy resolution of the plot.

Furthermore, the implied message that Western exploitation of Africans has ended is enough to make you want to throw things at the screen.

As one character points out, first it was ivory, then gold, then diamonds -“ now he hopes they never discover oil. An end-title delivers a sobering note: there are still several hundred thousand boy soldiers in Africa.