Blood Diamond (DVD)

Danny Archer is a hunter with a difference - he hunts diamonds and sells them to governments and organisations that then use them to fund civil war in Sierra Leone. Solomon Vandy is a happy family man until one day the army arrives in his village and takes him hostage, forcing him to hunt for diamonds to fund more fighting. When he comes across an enormous diamond, he manages to hide it and escape. While working to earn the money to return home, he comes across Archer who finds out about the diamond and wants Solomon to find it for him. On their journey, they come across an American journalist, Maddy Bowen, who wants to tell the story of the role of diamonds in the civil ...  Read the complete review

Synopsis An ex-mercenary turned smuggler (Leonard DiCaprio). A Mende fisherman (Djimon Hounsou). Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed across the alternately beautiful and ravaged countryside. Directed by Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai), this urgent, intensely moving adventure shapes gripping human stories and heart-pounding action into a modern epic of profound impact. The Story The story is set in ...  Read the complete review

Blood Diamond is an interesting film casting a look into the diamond industry. Here we discover that there is a dark side and in Africa there are diamond mines that are used to fund civil warfare, innocent people are being killed and children taken from their families to be trained as soldiers. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Danny Archer an African diamond-smuggler who whilst in prison learns of a big diamond which could be worth a fortune. The diamond has been found by Solomon Vandy who has just escaped from rebels where he was forced to work in the diamond mines and where he found the diamond. Danny manages to get him out of jail and makes a deal with Solomon ...  Read the complete review

There's nothing more irritating than an 'issues' movie that also tries to be a Hollywood blockbuster. These two bedfellows do not mix. The topic of the West African conflict diamond trade explored here is credible and worthy for a big budget movie, generating discussion on a nasty business, but once you cast it all wrong it looses too much of its credibility. In anyone's imagination Leonardo DiCaprio (armed with a wretched array of Afrikaans dialects) does not look old enough or hard enough to be a battle hardened African mercenary of two grueling civil wars. With lightweight token totty love interest in Jennifer Connelly alongside it's almost nudged into 'Romancing the ...  Read the complete review

When I first heard about Blood Diamond, I was like not another Leonardo DiCaprio movie. I'm probably one of the only people who can't stand one of his first movies, Titanic. Titanic came out in 1997 and DiCaprio was young and quite juvenile in his acting. His acting in 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape' is fantastic, but when I first watched Titanic I was slightly disappointed, so when we rented this film from Blockbusters I was slightly worried. It's quite slow to get into, but I've always give a film about 45 minutes, because that's when most of them start to get into it, and this film was the same. DiCaprio's acting was fantastic, his South African accent was ...  Read the complete review