“Sierra Leone in 1999 is rich with diamonds and lousy with men who use them to get fat and wage war. As outlined by Blood Diamond, innocents are rounded up and forced to sift for diamonds that, when found, are used to buy weapons to prosecute civil war. These ‘conflict diamonds’ are bought by conglomerates that then either mix them with non-conflict stones and sell them in legitimate jewelry stores around the world or warehouse them to keep them from flooding the market and driving the price of the ostensibly rare item down.
“Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the middleman in the scheme, the weapons runner who trades arms for stones then sells them to the diamond big boys in London. Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) is a forced-labor Sierra Leonean who finds a dandy of a rock and hides it before being arrested following a government raid on the rebel camp. …”
Read the rest of Greg Akers’ review here.
