"Blood Diamond" plays like a chaser to "Apocalypto": A good man spends about two hours of screen time on the lam trying to stay alive and eventually reunite with his family.
In the South Africa-based "Blood Diamond," written by Charles Leavitt and directed by Edward Zwick, Sierra Leone's civil war is in progress in 1999 when humble fisherman Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) gets separated from his family including son Dia (Kagiso Kuypers), who is about 10.
Though enslaved and placed in hard labor in diamond marshes by the wicked Revolutionary United Front, Solomon escapes with a large pink diamond. His main goal is to find and liberate his son, who also was apprehended by the revolutionaries for indoctrination as a cutthroat soldier.
Danny Archer (a persuasively accented Leonardo DiCaprio), who says he's from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), is a seasoned me-first-and-me-only smuggler hoping to appropriate Solomon's diamond and hustle it over to Liberia.
Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) is a U.S. journalist eager to expose the practice of exporting "conflict stones," of which, we're told, two-thirds are sold to U.S. diamond merchants.
"Blood Diamond's" thematic underbelly is high-minded -- toss your diamonds wherever you dumped your furs a few years ago -- but it's conventional to the core and doesn't earn the tears it coaxes toward the end.
- In wide release.
Details
'Blood Diamond' Rated R for strong violence and language;
