Blood Diamond review

Readers with rocks on your fingers, take note. Bling is bad. Bling kills. Bling turns farm kids into smacked-out soldiers, slaughtering their brothers and sisters. Such is the message of Blood Diamond, anyway – Edward Zwick’s didactic follow-up to The Last Samurai. Like ivory and gold beforehand, the West has discovered something it likes in Africa, leading the locals into a tragic squabble for a cut. In this Sierra Leonean hellhole, tension beats down with oppressive heat and no one knows friends from killers.

Amid the carnage (and as ambivalent as the natives) is DiCaprio. Carrying off a Zimbabwean accent with “Mebbe ah wazn’t bristfed as a chide” aplomb, his Danny is a reprehensible, immoral materialist; happy to exploit Solomon sod the consequences. However, he’s a reprehensible, immoral materialist with a distressing backstory, making his actions almost understandable. Also, next to Jennifer Connelly’s Maddy, he’s positively charming – her slightly annoying, massively stereotypical journalist bristling with all the wit and insight of a gap year do-gooder.

Her catchphrases (“This is what one million refugees look like. And you might catch it somewhere between the sports and weather” ) though are typical of a film that adds scripted sheen to a horrific confllict. Here, every sentence is a sermon, to the extent that even random OAP villagers show an unlikely awareness of current affairs by saying, “Let’s hope they don’t discover oil here, or else we’d have real problems.”

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And yet, a film set to rattle Hollywood’s opulent guilt, Blood Diamond is hard not to admire. Crammed full of exhilarating set-pieces and panoramic photography, it also includes the DiCaprio role most likely to snag Best Actor loot. Not quite up to The Departed, this is nevertheless the conscience-pinging Oscar loves. What’s more, by keeping the troubles at a safe distance, shrouded behind soundbites, viewer guilt never becomes too uncomfortable. In fact, come the credits (“It is up to the consumer to insist on non-conflict diamonds”), we have become impotent bystanders in a conflict out of our control. An earlier montage shows good stones mixing with bad way before vendors sell them. What can we do?

The diamond business is a confusing, cyclical one: full of Western hypocrisy, indigenous tragedy and billions of pounds – issues Blood Diamond skims through with cold, cinematic efficiency. No one here small-talks, instead they ram points home. As legend has it, Africa’s red soil runs with the claret-spill of centuries old conflict. Watch Zwick’s film, though and you’ll feel moved, but not moved enough – unlikely to feel the dirt running through your jewellery-laden fingers.