'Blood Diamond'

Agold-plated pamphlet against the illicit diamond trade, "Blood Diamond" is also a routine African adventure film about a soldier of fortune. It ends by suggesting that despite new world controls, it's up to us to tell diamond dealers that we don't want any "conflict" stones.
I will, of course, emphasize that on my weekly visit to the ice broker. In the meanwhile, let's appraise the facets of a gleamingly flawed movie.
Starting with Leonardo DiCaprio, still boyish but with maturing heft as gotta-get-mine smuggler Danny Archer. He is up from Rhodesia by way of South Africa and its past, racist army.

Jennifer Connelly, as story-hungry reporter Maddy Bowen, reminds him that old Rho is now called Zimbabwe. Danny swallows a grunt, darts his eyes nervously, has another suck of cigarette. The two share anxiety in Sierra Leone, the West African nation being ripped up by civil war (1999), by roving mobs of thugs and the rotten white mischief of big diamond traders.

DiCaprio and Connelly trade zingy bar banter, heedless that Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell did this with such canny ease 50 years ago. Certain kinds of corn are best left to past film fare.

Those studio stars didn't have the crushing harness that grips the new ones. Bob and Jane didn't need to worry that sexy repartee would be sandwiched between scenes of tribal families being mowed down by Kalashnikovs, or childish arms explicitly hacked off by sadists, or boys pulled away from screaming mothers to serve in "rebel" armies like a sickening reduction of "Oliver Twist."

Attempting the sort of moral heft that "The Constant Gardener" brought to African torment (with similar political asides), "Blood Diamond" has an almost biblical plot figure: Solomon Vandy, a fisherman whose family is terrorized, acted by imposing, sculptural Djimon Hounsou. His son is stolen into thug service by creepy Capt. Poison (David Harewood), who even wears an eye-patch and calls himself a devil.

Solomon forms a testy trio with Maddy and Danny, and they ramble through hell's cellar. There are moments for lush scenery and some animals, and tracker Danny speaks memorably of baboon dung. Maddy, perhaps exhausted by her own moralizing, lets the men do the big slog, seeking Solomon's son and a big diamond that Solomon found when he was a mining slave of Poison's.

Not even a geological survey team led by Stanley & Livingstone would likely find the gem, buried in jungle earth that has been heavily turned over. But without it, the plot won't get its strands yanked tight for obvious lessons, including a noble one from Danny, redeemed from cynicism.

Director Edward Zwick, whose movies tend to preen, swell and stretch, pushes lengths past the obvious emotional closure and moral payoff. He appends an anticlimax of Maddy, Solomon and a conference on the diamond biz so stately that we expect Nelson Mandela to show up and denounce Tiffany's.

A Warner Bros. release. Director: Edward Zwick. Writers: Charles Leavitt, C. Gaby Mitchell. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly, Djimon Hounsou, Arnold Vosloo, David Harewood. Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes. Rated R. 2 stars.