Blood Diamond tells the story of two men in Sierra Leone, one a fisherman, one a smuggler. Djimon Hounsou plays Solomon Vandy a father of 3 who early in the film sees his village destroyed by rebels and is taken into slavery to mine diamonds. He finds a large pink diamond and at personal peril, hides it, and narrowly esapes through a series of events that are a little to coincidental. These early scenes of random and brutal violence while not gory, are pretty harrowing.
Vandy ends up in a prison which is also holding a Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a Rhodesian mercenary on smuggling charges. He hears rumor of the diamond and views it as his ticket out of Africa. He partners with Vandy with the promise of helping him find his family. They later team up with American journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) who is trying to write a story about conflict diamonds but can't get enough facts to do so.
The plot is a basic quest, with enough turns of finding family members, bribing officials, and seeing the story of people ravaged by the turmoil in the country. Moreso, it has three strong performances and gives the characters time to talk and reveal their backgrounds. Some things seemed odd to me, Archer returns to the area after visiting his current employer and is shown talking to Vandy and we have no idea how he found him. A romance between Archer and Bowen develops, though not in the typical Hollywood way and even though the script goes to some efforts to explain how that might be, and the performances are good, it didn't quite seem genuine to me.
I really enjoyed this film. It starts off very strong and is filled with action, intrigue, and social commentary. The flaws are somewhat slight but keeps it at a very good instead of a great rating. Still, it was worth the time and money to see it.
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