Blood Diamond Review

There is a hard, well reported thriller inside this film, and Edward Zwick keeps stepping in front of it to spell out the lesson. The accent is the headline, and it earns the attention: DiCaprio's Rhodesian vowels are precise, and Danny Archer works because the performance never asks to be liked, only understood as a man priced by the war that raised him. Djimon Hounsou is the spine of the thing as Solomon Vandy, and the scene in which he finds his son conscripted and parroting militia lines is the one moment the movie stops arguing and simply watches.

Eduardo Serra shoots the raids in hard daylight with a handheld urgency that refuses to prettify them. Against that, Jennifer Connelly's journalist exists to ask Archer the questions the audience is meant to have, and her lines read closer to a briefing than to speech. The shape is the old one too, a national catastrophe routed through a white man's conscience. The last twenty minutes trade the reporting for a mountainside shootout and a deathbed phone call.