Edward Zwick (Glory) has long been one of Hollywood’s more thoughtful studio filmmakers, but his thoughtfulness gets the best of him here This story of how “conflict diamonds” fueled the civil war in 1990s Sierra Leone should be about those whose lives were upended because of the illicit diamond trade. It does feature one such man, played by Djimon Hounsou, yet he is a distant second banana to Leonardo DiCaprio’s soldier of fortune turned diamond smuggler, who begins to grow a conscience. Blood Diamond could not have been made – at least on this scale – without DiCaprio’s star power, but a smaller, better movie could have been made instead, one that focused on Hounsou’s character.
