Hard rocks

Blood Diamond takes a swipe at diamonds both clean and conflicted | Priya Abraham

In a brief rest from AK-47-toting rebels, a war-hardened Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) tries to make sense of human nature from the bloody chaos around him. Are people naturally good or bad? Nah, he concludes: "They're just people."

Most of Blood Diamond (rated R for strong violence and language) has the same tenor—frequent near-misses at profundity, and consequent lapses into the Africa-as-hellhole genre. As pure entertainment, the film is both heart-rending and enjoyable. As an advocacy piece against conflict diamonds—the illicit diamond mining that funds war—it's middling.

The plot follows diamond smuggler Archer and fisherman Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) through 1999 Sierra Leone as they try to uncover a valuable pink diamond. At the time, conflict diamonds funded rebels there and war in Liberia and Guinea.

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December 23, 2006, Vol. 21, No. 49

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