Blood Diamond No Gem

Blood Diamond is a terribly mediocre film. It is gorgeously photographed, especially the landscapes, and most sequences are handled with some competence. Mostly, though, it serves to further reveal director Edward Zwick to be the movie director equivalent of a bad foreign correspondent. Like his last film, The Last Samurai, it is about a cranky, selfish white mercenary who redeems himself with some help from a native culture in the midst of violent upheaval. And, like that film, it is almost unbearably preachy, alternating between three types of scenes: earnest lectures, emotional pleas, and deeply confused action scenes.

The lectures and emotional please are obvious, the sort of “these people are dying!” monologues actors have been earnestly delivering in hopes of Oscar success for years. Zwick with the same sort of stolid, portentous seriousness—learn these lessons, people—that inflicted every frame of Last Samurai, and the result here is no better. For Zwick, everything boils down to a matter of Western capitalist guilt; half the scenes feel like deluded trust-fund brats giving their first report in a world cultures elective.

At least this isn’t surprising. It’s the action scenes that really rankle. They are confused at a fundamental level, never sure whether to be exciting or horrifying. We watch mass slaughter of innocents, but Zwick isn’t sure he should make these sequences simply traumatic (this is a big-star Hollywood movie, after all), so he gives them some action-scene zip. Be thrilled as Leonardo DiCaprio dodges bullets and guns down rebels! Watch the rebels spray down crowds of civilians and hack off their limbs! Zwick’s directorial instincts flail between these two poles, as if he can’t decide whether to simply make a guilt-inducing message movie or to make a guilt-inducing message movie that’s also fun and exciting. The problem, of course, is that neither are good ideas.