Wimpy

I am so incredibly angry about this movie, I can only hope I can get my thoughts out in a semi-coherent way.

What a piece of crap.  And it didn’t have to be.  Blood Diamond represents one of the worst examples of an on-screen abortion I’ve ever seen, a great movie with a great set-up with some great actors that goes well out of its way to disembowel itself mid-stream for no reason whatsoever.  The plot is not so complex that the screen writers wrote themselves into an inescapable corner.  The actors didn’t quit halfway through.  Production was not plagued with budgetary issues.  The director didn’t suddenly succumb to syphilitic hallucinations… no, no, wait.  Maybe that last one would explain what happened.

The plot is very simple:  A South African (Rhodesian) man who’s spent the majority of his life as a soldier of fortune, con man and prize hunting loner, stumbles on a Sierra Leone man who has himself stumbled on a rare and incredibly valuable diamond.  Danny Archer, the South African needs the diamond to get himself out of a very Hollywood-style bind he’s gotten in, and Solomon, the Sierra Leone man, wants to get his family back who have been swept up in the violence of a country in utter political and social turmoil.

One is a good man who cares only for his family, the other is a scoundrel who could perhaps learn a lesson.  Simple right?  And in the process of enjoying the story the audience will learn a little something about what we encourage when we buy diamonds.

The first forty minutes of the movie function, extremely well, on this level.  The film is brutal, unflinchingly showing awful, real violence against women and children (and, ironically despite this, still obviously blurs out a man’s penis, because the human body is a travesty but small kids and their mothers being mowed down is fine to show; thanks Jack Valenti).  Rarely have I seen this level of realistic violence in a mainstream movie and I was truly impressed.  Danny Archer is an intriguing character and works well against Djimon Hounsou’s simpler but deep loving father and husband character.

At this point I was totally engaged in the movie.

And than, a little less than an hour into a movie 138 minutes in length, the whole damn thing began to unravel.  At record speed, at that.  Jennifer Connelly, a fine actress, is introduced as a reporter obviously only in the movie for the sake of making sure us stupid movie-goers get the point of the film, rather than letting us enjoy the film and draw the only clear conclusion.  No, no.  We must be hammered with it.  It is a wonder to me that Ms. Connelly managed to deliver some of her lines without spontaneously vomiting all over the nearest camera man.

****NOTE WELL:  WHAT FOLLOWS CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS THAT THE REVIEWER SWEARS REALLY DON’T MATTER BECAUSE NEITHER DOES THE FILM.****

As though this weren’t enough, at this point the plot begins a tailspin that momentarily touches it down in every conceivable type of film, utilizing every conceivable type of character.  I suppose Mr. Di Caprio has been nominated for this film because of how admirably he plays about five completely different characters… or is he supposed to have multiple personality disorder?  Mr. Hounsou does an excellent job, as he always does, with his character except that the miserable screenplay requires him to constantly forget his main and major motivation, that he is a father desperately trying to rescue his son from a fate, truly, worse than death.  And yet there doesn’t seem to be time in the screenplay to deal with this major concern.

The incredibly powerful scenes of carnage are than countered with the worst examples of 80s action cinema filming and plotting I’ve seen since Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone committed them in the 80s.  And at least than it was still fun.  Why and how do you arc a character like Danny Archer in the following way:  Interesting smuggler/scoundrel, selfish profiteer, shameless user, wounded pathos, redeemable human, almost redeemed human, Humphrey Bogart (oh yeah, almost right down to the lines putting a chick on a plane), sudden heartless schizophrenic psychopath, racist, numb war profiteer again, wounded scumbag, redeemed sinner, lover of all creatures great and small?  That’s not an arc; that’s a diagnosis from Arkham Asylum.

Over the top?  I agree.  Watch the movie and tell me if I missed anything.

What we have in Blood Diamond is one of the most egregious examples of the manufacturing of tension I’ve ever seen.  After a very successful and very natural 45 minutes the movie bores on and on and on, missing several natural closing points by manufacturing tense moments against all possible logic and reality, to keep you in the theater for as long as possible, hopefully tearing up and GETTING THE MESSAGE.  Remember the mailman in Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Your Drinking Your Juice in the Hood?  Well, his sudden shouts of “MESSAGE!” wouldn’t have seemed out of place for a second in greater second part of this debacle.  But instead of following the story to its natural ends the writer and director create sequences for the sole purpose of getting the audience to feel tense again and remember that this situation in Africa is uncomfortable for us. 

(An example of what Leonardo Di Caprio’s characters rationale seems to be at a certain point in the movie: “So, get this:  I’m going to say make an assurance I have no basis for making, and call in an air strike based on this assurance, just so I have to run into the air strike later to make up for what that assurance which was wrong earlier but will give the audience another opportunity to fear for the safety of every character they care about despite the fact that none of them should be in this danger in the first place.  Sound good?  Okay, I’ll make the call.  Give me a second to give out some really bad exposition into the phone.  Don’t worry too much though, at critical moments resulting rather inexplicably from this decision I’m making the army pursuing us will take regularly scheduled union breaks so as to give us further moments of peace during which to resume reciting exposition barely worthy to be tacked onto the end of The Village.”

This is manufactured tension.)

Here’s the plot that would have worked:  Realizing something he’s been holding inside since the terrible demise of his parents years ago, Danny Archer begins to sympathize with Solomon Grady who’s only goal is to make sure his child doesn’t follow the same path Archer’s been suffering on silently for years.  This brings about the gradual but natural arc in his story that leads him to the redemption they’ve obviously set up for us from the beginning and Djimon Hounsou gets to act the hell out of much meatier role of desperate father.  Is this unbelievably original?  No, but A) neither is what message director Edward Zwick does, and B) it provides us with a clearer, shorter, less angering way of getting the point that because of our desire for diamonds, a country is being destroyed without being hammered it into our heads to the point of us no longer caring about the message.

I apologize if I’ve given too much away with this review; I’ve tried not to.  But I promise you this:  If you read this and than go see the movie, you’ll have figured out everything I said by about minute 57 anyway.  What you won’t have guessed at, despite having read this review, is how truly bad the very good movie you started watching is about to get.

Blood Diamond is the worst kind of failure.  It’s a failure that had no reason to be so, a movie that, like a child from a family both wealthy and loving, still found a way to completely and utterly destroy its own existence for no other reason than that it could.