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In Ed Zwick's movie The Last Samurai, Tom Cruise singlehandedly sorted out feudal Japan. In his follow-up Blood Diamond Leonardo DiCaprio does much the same for Africa. Sporting what may well be a plausible Zimbabwean accent, the boy wonder plays a tough diamond smuggler drawn against his will into Djimon Hounsou's search for his son, who has been kidnapped by Sierra Leonean rebels. But what Leo really wants is the massive diamond that Hounsou has hidden in the jungle.

On their quest to find the elusive diamond and Hounsou's missing kid, our heroes encounter Jennifer Connelly, playing an implausibly gorgeous foreign correspondent with even less plausibly rigid principles. Naturally, she and Leo fall in lurve and she teaches him to be a better man.

If you can ignore Zwick's colonial bombast, Blood Diamond is quite a ride: a gripping tale of greed and exploitation set against a background that seems constantly on the verge of explosive violence. It's the sort of film that mainstream studio Hollywood does extremely well - handsome, an expensive production, classy acting, unobtrusive direction and a good story. Plus, it's a relief to find an Oscar-baiting prestige product like this that actually has a story to tell and a degree of thematic depth - nothing world-shattering, but an interesting examination of exploitation as a concept.

"A ROOTIN' TOOTIN' YARN"

Shame, then, that the African side of the story gets so little attention. While Leo and Jennifer have good crunchy characters to play with, the always brilliant Hounsou is stuck with an underwritten, saintly tribesman type. Director Zwick has a tendency to lecture the audience about the dirty business of "conflict diamonds", but his film is too simplistic to function as an effective political commentary. However, as a rootin-tootin boy's own adventure yarn it works just fine.

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Blood Diamond is released in UK cinemas on Friday 26th January 2007.