Release Date: December 8, 2006

(out of 4)

"Blood Diamond" has a righteous message to get across to its audience about how the African diamond trade has sparked civil war and child enslavement. But this is the kind of film that within the opening scenes chooses to bombard you with so much inexplicable violence – pillaging of villagers, human limb mutilation, executions, forced labor – that you are overwhelmed by feelings of hopelessness for the situation.

If you are choked by the terribleness by all of this, then you might have forgotten already what the film is saying about the origins of violence, which is that diamonds are used for the arms trade and slave trade. The film wants to let us know however that’s it okay to still buy diamonds from our local jewelers as long as we are assured that they are “conflict-free” diamonds. When we buy diamonds, from say Sierra Leone, where this film takes place, somebody likely died somewhere because of them.

Of course, in this blood-soaked entertainment disguised as a message film, there are patented heroes. Leonardo DiCaprio is a free-for-hire rogue Danny Archer, and he has a big accent (DiCaprio likes to over-pronounce the last word at the end of every sentence). Danny discovers that one exceptionally valuable pink diamond has been hidden somewhere by fisherman Solomon (Djimon Hounsou). Solomon has been separated from his family, and learns that he has to buy them out of a refugee camp. The two of them become unlikely comrades.

As the love interest, Jennifer Connelly is a journalist with a heart that gets involved in Danny’s quest to reacquire the pink diamond, hidden somewhere at a guard-patrolled mining farm. It’s a quest riddled with scenes of Danny and Solomon outrunning bullets, and of scenes of Connelly’s Maddey Bowen growing respect for Danny, whose intentions are sometimes hard to interpret. Danny is a character who only participates in danger as long as there is a pay-out at the end of it. As Danny, the lean but now ripped DiCaprio is convincing enough to play these types of roles, and he has the gravitas to make us believe that he could survive in war zone situations. But one has to wonder if DiCaprio spent as much time in a Hollywood tanning salon as he did researching his part – his skin is lacquered golden brown, but not blotchy or leathered skinned as you’d expect to see on a traveling smuggler of the world.

Speaking of war zones, "Blood Diamond" as it goes along becomes less about unfortunate civilian deaths than it does become about whether DiCaprio can run through the middle of a battlefield, elude machine gun bullets, and escape unscathed out the other end. The last thirty minutes of this overlong two-hour plus film features so many action theatrics that the film’s message becomes buried underneath the noise. It’s easy to forget anything that was learned about conflict-diamonds once the end credits roll. Our senses at that point have become numb.

In Edward Zwick’s previous ballyhoo qausi-prestige film "The Last Samurai," hero Tom Cruise became invincible against a firestorm of machine gun bullets and had the courage to make a big speech before the monarch and, uh, said something. "Blood Diamond" lacks the same such subtlety, as it makes big squawking statements about the injustices of Africa, such forgotten statements as they are. Yet amidst all of the film’s , the film denies us the information on what Interpol has done with any of these ruthless diamond mercenaries. Are these mercenaries set free, in the name of corruption, to continue the flow of the diamond trade economy? Other such subject-related questions are also easily subsided.

One could be glad that they received a message about conflict diamonds from this film, but one could easily prefer that the message had been delivered in a different film. A different film entirely. This is a bloated affair with a preoccupation to depress you more than enlighten you. In superior films like "Hotel Rwanda" and "The Constant Gardener," the violence was graphic and intense and the message heartrending, but at least you didn’t feel like the filmmakers were caught up solely in creating images of the hacking and butchering of human lives as a storytelling cheap tactic.