Entertainment, Movies - Air Force Times

‘Blood Diamond’: The high price of ice

It’s often said that many more of us would be vegetarians if we were made intimately familiar with the precise journey that our filet mignon takes on its way from hoof to dinner plate.

Director Ed Zwick and writer Charles Leavitt use the same line of thinking in hopes of sparking similar discomfort toward our most precious gem in “Blood Diamond,” a sometimes unwieldy moral lecture wrapped inside a rip-roaring “Indiana Jones”-style adventure.

Zwick and Leavitt clearly are out to prick the social conscience of Americans who, the film notes, devour a typically gluttonous share — between half and two-thirds — of the world’s diamond production.

A portion of that supply (the precise percentage is impossible to know; estimates range from 1 percent to 15 percent or more) is made up of “conflict stones” — diamonds snatched from war-torn regions of Africa and funneled to European markets. The proceeds are used by terrorists and rebel groups to foment the violence that keeps large swaths of the continent in chaos.

In a global market measured in tens of billions of dollars a year, even a small percentage of conflict stones equals a large pile of blood-soaked rocks. As soldier-of-fortune Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) notes, in the U.S. it’s “bling bling,” but in Africa it’s often “bling bang.”

The film is set in Sierra Leone in 1999, when that nation was gripped by a brutal civil war between the government and rebel guerrillas. Danny, a South African (he prefers “Rhodesian”), runs guns to the rebels and takes diamonds in payment, which he smuggles next door to Liberia to begin their trip to Europe.

The story takes shape when Danny hears that Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), a tribal fisherman torn from his family by the rebels and just recently released from slave labor in a rebel diamond pit, has found and hidden a huge, valuable pink diamond.

Danny convinces Solomon that the only way to reunite his family is to sell the diamond and use the proceeds to grease the wheels — with Danny acting as middleman for a hefty cut, of course.

Complications ensue with the appearance of Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), an American journalist looking to rip the cover off the blood diamond trade who sees Danny as a potential meal ticket.

These three disparate souls —all looking to use one another for self-serving purposes — come together for a surreal journey through a violence-wracked landscape where guns are cheap and lives are even cheaper.

The film wears its agenda on its sleeve, to the point that it sometimes feels like a nanny delivering a scolding. Even when it’s entirely appropriate and well-deserved, most people respond to a scolding with resentment.

Zwick also takes patently absurd shortcuts for the sake of narrative flow. When our intrepid trio arrives at the refugee camp that supposedly is home to Solomon’s family — a teeming mass of more than a million people — Solomon stands outside the fence for no more than 30 seconds before spotting his wife and daughters inside. Uh, yeah.

Still, the film has plenty of things to like — gripping action, a lushly exotic locale and strong lead actors. DiCaprio continues to mature by leaps and bounds, and Hounsou has been a standout presence in every film in which he’s appeared (he impressed as one of Russell Crowe’s fellow fighters in “Gladiator,” for example).

Despite its heavy-handedness, the indelible images in “Blood Diamond” surely will spring to mind the next time you pause to admire the glittering baubles in the jewelry store window at your local mall.

3 stars. Rated R for strong violence, language. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.