Thin Blood
Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) slouches across a bar in Sierra Leone. It’s 1999, and the West African nation is mired in a civil war. Our hero, a world-weary soldier of fortune, has struck up a conversation with Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly), a foxy idealist reporting on the diamond trade for an American newsweekly. As an operative in a vast conspiracy to exploit the country’s unrest in the harvesting of precious stones, Danny holds the key to her story.
“T.I.A.,” he mutters — this is Africa. This is Africa, all right — the movie version used again as the backdrop to a story about boring white people whose sham heroics are thrown into greater relief when they’re surrounded by noble Africans and their vicious enemies.
Directed by Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai) from a screenplay by the author of legendary sociopolitical treatise K-PAX (Charles Leavitt), Blood Diamond sends three refugees from central casting on a quest for an egg-sized pink diamond. When Revolutionary United Front rebels rampage through his village, Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is wrenched from his family and put to work mining diamonds. Pulling what looks like a giant, rusty crack pipe from the river, Solomon retrieves the rock and sets about hiding it when government soldiers bust in and cart everyone off to jail. Word of the diamond soon reaches Danny, himself imprisoned for the possession of criminally ridiculous blond highlights, and a scheme is hatched.
The holy trinity of African adventure-flick clichés — the amoral mercenary, the righteous native, the idealistic reporter — is soon completed by the arrival of Maddy, and everyone heads into the picturesque jungles, slums and refugee camps of war-torn Sierra Leone. Endless stretches of witless torpor are interrupted by jarring violence; this bland Oscar bait bristles to life only at the touch of mass murder. The workmanlike Zwick demonstrates verve only when there’s a deadly set piece to mount: 8-year-old RUF agents mowing down women with AK-47s, innocents shredded to pieces in the crossfire, limbs severed, buildings detonated, cars aflame, shrapnel whizzing through flesh.
It’s remarkable that a movie presumably opposed to Western exploitation of Africa exhibits a heartbeat only when slaughtering its anonymous, dark-skinned extras. To be sure, there’s splendid momentum to the havoc here, a real thrill in the quickness of death leaping from the jungle, machine-gun fire rattling though the ominous bass of gangsta rap. Such excitement would be less unsettling had its spark flared from any idea larger than “whoa, shit is messed up in Africa.”
De Beers can relax; any indignation stirred up here won’t be from those who worry about where their jewelry comes from but rather from audiences incensed by facile politics and bad storytelling.
