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To be quite blunt, this was a bad movie with a poorly crafted and misleading social message. Many fellow reviewers undoubtedly found the message a redeeming enough quality to warrant a good review for a poorly written movie with poor continuity; but I feel the director either misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented the situation in warn-torn diamond producing African nations, such as Sierre Leone. Upon suffering through the lengthy, often slow-moving film it is not difficult to understand how Blood Diamond flopped so miserably at the box office.

The movie itself was full of continuity errors, to name just a few examples, in the first scene of the movie, Solomon (Danny Archer) is walking his son to school. The two have quite obviously walked several miles from their home where they started out when suddenly several off-roading vehicles blaring rap music turn the corner and speed off in the direction of their village. Somehow, from miles away and on foot, Solomon is able to beat the speeding vehicles back to the village and warn his family in time, just before the vehicles pull into the village.

There was also a scene on a bus when one of the minor characters was smoking a nearly-finished cigarette on-screen and when the camera cut back his cigarette was longer than it had been before. He was in the center of both shots, and the cut away did not last long. In the context of the scene it was a painfully obvious discontinuity. Those were two very in-your-face errors, among many which I caught during my first and only viewing; I was amazed and disgusted that the movie was full of these types of errors and the editors either did not notice or just didn't bother to edit for continuity.

Perhaps even more condemning than the movie's total lack of continuity was the poor writing and the overacting that accompanied it. The movie was entirely too predictable to be entertaining for entertainment's sake. If it did not have a carefully crafted, politcally correct social message I doubt the movie would have gotten any good reviews at all. If one can imagine the end scene in Titanic with DiCaprio clutching onto the piece of debris and telling Rose to never let go; that would give one a pretty accurate picture of the final scene in this movie - except that in this movie the whole thing is very drawn out and every step DiCaprio takes is so predictable it's painful until the moment when he whips out his mobile phone (which has amazing reception for such a remote location) to

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