‘Blood Diamond’ sinks; Americans not in the market for a conscience

In theaters

BLOOD DIAMOND, directed by Edward Zwick, written by Charles Leavitt, 138 minutes, rated R.

Just out in time for the holidays is Edward Zwick’s “Blood Diamond.” It’s a movie about the blood violence, enslavement of adults and children, and mass murder involved in the business of mining diamonds in Sierra Leone so fingers, necks and ears can look pretty elsewhere.

Set in 1999 during Sierra Leone’s civil war, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Danny Archer, a South African diamond smuggler hustling jewels across the border to Liberia, which buys them for sale on the open market, thus allowing the army to purchase arms for its war.

It is this army that’s responsible for pillaging villages and slaughtering most of its inhabitants. Those who are allowed to live are the fittest men, forced at gunpoint to sift the rivers for diamonds, as well as young boys who are brainwashed into becoming killing machines.

When the army storms into one village and divides fisherman Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou) from his family, the plot contrives to nudge him toward Archer, who wants the 100-carat diamond Vandy found and hid while working in the fields. Trouble is, Archer isn’t the only person who wants that diamond. Everyone does, which generates much of the film’s manufactured conflict as the story unfolds.

Smoldering in a romantic subplot is Jennifer Connelly’s Maddy Bowen, an idealistic journalist who believes that if people knew the brutality with which some diamonds are obtained, they wouldn’t buy them. So, yes, she’s annoyingly naive, though her hopes are high for Archer to find his conscience and come through with the facts she needs to tell her story to the world and thus, she believes, to change it.

What ensues is a beautifully shot movie with a terrific score by James Newton Howard that is sunk by formula and a bloated running time. It wants to be a political heavyweight that shakes people to take note of another side of Africa (as the movie notes, one’s bling really is one’s bling bang), but since so much of it is overly familiar and predictable, none of it gels in a way that grips, surprises or resonates.

That said, DiCaprio is very good here, nailing a difficult accent and capping a fine year (see his Academy Award-worthy turn in “The Departed”), while Hounsou, once again type-cast as the suffering face of Africa, digs deep to mine a fully realized character from Charles Leavitt’s two-dimensional script. In the end, one suspects the film’s subject matter won’t appeal to a mainstream audience of consumers who would prefer no baggage attached to their bling, thank you very much. As such, the box office for this bauble looks dismal.

Grade: C+

On DVD and Blu-ray

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, directed by David Frankel, written by Aline Brosh McKenna, 106 minutes, rated PG-13.

Long before “The Devil Wears Prada” pitched its fork in bookstores, audiences knew the deal: High fashion is hard-core. Can’t cut the couture? Then cut your Simplicity pattern elsewhere, cookie. This closed club of anorexic insiders, after all, hasn’t gathered to make a movie called “The Devil Wears Member’s Mark.”

From David Frankel, “The Devil Wears Prada” is based on Lauren Weisberger’s tougher, meaner best-selling novel. Since the world of high fashion is always prime for sending up, that’s what occurs here, though not as savagely as fans of the book might expect. The difference between this PG-13-rated movie and the R-rated book is that the movie wants to humanize the industry in ways that Weisberger never intended. It’s a film that at once condemns the allure of haute couture and is seduced by it.

So, mirroring the fashion world, it’s a hive of complications and contradictions. It’s also perfectly enjoyable, even if it does sell out its more diabolical scenes in an effort to appeal to the broadest possible audience. The film’s chief departure from the book is that it makes Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, the impeccably stylish, vicious editor of “Runway” magazine (think Anna Wintour of “Vogue”), slightly less of a terror, though Streep nevertheless is on a memorable tear here.

In the movie, Miranda’s prey is Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), a frumpy girl with baggy clothes who has just graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism with big dreams of becoming a writer.

Andy is bright, but she’s a naif. When she turns up at “Runway” for a job as one of Miranda’s assistants, she has no clue who Miranda is or the power she wields, no knowledge of the magazine she hopes to represent, and no idea about the history of fashion and its importance, which isn’t nearly as slight as she believes. All she sees is opportunity. As she’s told by friends, if she can make it through one year with Miranda Priestley, she will be able to command any magazine job that she wants.

What ensues, of course, is Andy’s transformation from duck to swan. It isn’t just Miranda’s disapproval that shapes her rather extreme makeover, but also the sneering disregard of Miranda’s scary first assistant, Emily (Emily Blunt), and the helpful assistance of Miranda’s art director, Nigel (Stanley Tucci), a man who knows his way, shall we say, around a Jimmy Choo. Since all of this builds to a predictable personal crisis for Andy – Can she look this great and be this much of a suck-up without becoming a devil herself? – the movie leans hard on the excellence of its cast to make it the satisfying, glossy film that it is.

Grade: B+

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays in Discovering, Fridays in Happening, and weekends in Television as well as on bangordailynews.com. He may be reached at christopher

@weekinrewind.com.