by Phillip Ellis

Created on: April 28, 2008

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 Stone', territory. The same thing happened with the Constant Gardner and it will happen again, such is the commercial responsibility of film making. You're either making Sahara or Syriana guys. There is no in-between.

The story of the recent civil war in Sierra Leone is one worth telling, although this is movie version is more Jackanory than Panorama, corruption and bad behavior from the west riddled all the way through the West Africa problem. From what I know, the west, led by the British, decided to oust a warlord on behalf of a diamond cartel based in London because the rebel leader in question was digging up too many good quality rocks with forced labor, driving down the price world wide, using the money to buy arms from the east to fund his rebellion. The fact he wasn't buying weapons from us, another reason to get rid of him. The reason the rebels were taking control of the diamond fields was because another diamond cartel not based in London was subsidizing the warlord's army to mess up the other cartel. The conflict rocks could then be smuggled over to Liberia, certificated, and then sold legally. If only Zimbabwe and Mugabe had diamonds.

The film doesn't really want to dig too deep into the truth as two thirds of the worlds diamonds are traded in America, many of the movie producers having to buy their wives a big one when films like this do well. The Diamond companies basically fund the warlords of the day in West Africa and as long as the price of non industrial diamonds is kept high they are happy. When British soldiers invaded Sierra Leone in 1999 it wasn't about brining democracy. We saw that Real Politick in Iraq. Too many men of Sierra Leone were having their hands chopped off by the bad guys so they couldn't vote in the coming election. And you can't work for 50p a day so the

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>