Reviews by Matt

Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is a fisherman in a South African village whose life is thrown in to turmoil when a group of rebels drive into his village and break up his family. His family gets away, but he is captured and forced to work for them by mining for diamonds. One day he finds a rare pink diamond, but when a government raids the site, he is forced to hide it and is soon imprisoned. Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a diamond smuggler learns that Solomon knows where to find a very valuable diamond. He arranges to get him out of prison and tries to get him to take him to the diamond in exchange for helping Solomon find his family.

This past year has almost made me forget that I once had an unfounded hatred of DiCaprio. He has proved that just because I feel that “Titanic” is one of the most overrated movies ever made, that I should not fault him for it. He was great in “The Departed” and again, he does a good job in “Blood Diamond.” I was not bothered by the South African accent as some were. I liked how he portrayed a horrible character who uses Solomon to get what he wants, but you still cannot hate him as much as you should. There is a good person beneath the bad guy exterior. There are moments where he does things not because he has to, but because it is the right thing to do. It is in these moments where Archer redeems himself in the eyes of the audience. DiCaprio gives a strong performance, one of the best of the movie. Though I do think that the entire Oscar/ Golden Globe buzz is a little much. His performance is good, but not as good as many are claiming it is.

Djimon Hounsou has been perfecting this character for years; he always seems to play the suffering African villager. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though it is bad for his career because he has been typecast into theses roles. The good thing is that he is good at it. As Solomon he is a character who will fight and die to find his family. He is even willing to give up a very valuable diamond, the thing that can get his family a better life, just to get them back. For all his strength and willingness to sacrifice for his family, he is ignorant. He does not see that Archer is using him to get to the diamond. He is too trusting of Archer and believes that he has good intentions.


The conscious of this movie is Maddy Bowen, played by Jennifer Connelly. She is an American journalist in South Africa covering the diamond smuggling. She meets Archer in a bar and they talk about the moral of the movie. Blood diamonds are being smuggled out of the country to one with no known diamonds. Those are then bought cheap by the diamond suppliers and hidden away so that they can control the price of diamonds. Connelly is there to make us all feel bad for buying diamonds and not making sure that that are not conflict diamonds. In the 1990’s in Sierra Leone, where and when the movie takes place there was a bloody civil war and at the heart of all this was the diamond trade, the rebels used their captives to mine for nothing then turn a profit when they sold them to smugglers to get out of the country. I was hit over the head with these facts over and over again and it got to the point where it was way too much. It was good for exposition, to give the story a powerful backdrop, but was it necessary to tell the audience over and over how bad this was? The images of the brutality were more then enough to get that point across.

If it helps any, for the most part, there are fewer conflict diamonds on the market now then there were in the 90’s If one should feel like being preached at, go see “Blood Diamond” If not you can still go see it, but I recommend that whenever Jennifer Connelly is on screen put your fingers in you ears and say “la la la” really loud until she is gone.

7 out of 10
Rated R for strong violence and language.
Runtime: 138 min