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Felled by good intentions

CONFUSION: Leonardo Di Caprio and Djimon Hounsou in Blood Diamond.

Blood Diamond

(English)

Cast: Leonardo Di Caprio, Djimon Hounsou, and Jennifer Connelly

Director: Edward Zwick

In the great movie graveyard, you will find a movie with the inscription, Here lies Blood Diamond, killed by good intentions.

And next to it you will surely find Martin Campbell's Beyond Borders, also killed by the same fatal disease.

Issues

The film addresses serious issues such as conflict diamonds, (diamonds smuggled out of countries at war and sold for arms) and the truly horrifying fate of child soldiers apart from a continent ravaged by civil war forever.

But the film also wants to be a treasure hunt, a buddy film, and a rip-roaring adventure and finally ends up supremely muddled.

There is noble native in the person of Djimon Hounsou as Solomon Vandy, a fisherman who has been taken from his family and forced to work in diamond mines.

He finds a huge pink diamond and hides it fairly easily deciding that it is the ticket to find him his family, including his son who has been taken by the rebel forces and trained to be a child soldier.

Then there is ruthless diamond smuggler Rhodesian Danny Archer (Leonardo Di Caprio).

There is also bleeding heart journalist Maddy (Jennifer Connelly) working on a story on conflict diamonds.

Oh to work on these publications that exist only in Hollywood - without deadline or budget pressures!

Set in Sierra Leone circa 1999, the movie is shot on location in Africa, which looks breathtaking as always.

The main problem with the movie is it is not sure what it wants to be.

So there are the expected exotic Africa shots interspersed with "oh this is a serious film" and civil war, starving children, vicious gang lords and the like.

The confusion has spread to cast as well and none as much as Di Caprio who sometimes speaks a mean African accent which slips off disconcertingly.

There are all these weighty bits of dialogue like Di Caprio's character says, "In America you call it bling bling, while here it is bling bang," that in the final count are just that - dialogues that mean nothing. It would have been better if Zwick had stuck to adventure yarn, treasure and the rest of it rather than use human suffering as window dressing. All who wish to make cause films should remember that good intentions do not automatically translate into good cinema.

Mini Anthikad Chhibber

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