This diamond-industry drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connelly aims for clarity but lacks sparkle.

Dec. 8, 2006 | "Blood Diamond," set in late-1990s Sierra Leone, before the end of that country's civil war, is a public-service announcement masquerading as an adventure story, a picture made with a great deal of enthusiasm and conviction -- just not enough to make it any good. Leonardo DiCaprio plays South African smuggler and all-around wheeler-dealer Danny Archer; Djimon Hounsou is Solomon Vandy, a Sierra Leone fisherman whose family has been carried off by rebel fighters. (The rebel raid on Solomon's village, which occurs early in the picture, is a sharp snapshot of violence and terror that both sets the movie's somber tone and renders its later action scenes superfluous to the point of tastelessness.) Solomon, his family gone, is forced by his rebel captors to work in the diamond fields, where he discovers a giant pink gem that he risks his life to hide. Archer, who makes his living trading diamonds for arms, learns of the stone's existence and becomes driven to find it, but he needs Solomon's help to do so. Solomon, knowing the diamond is his only hope of getting his family back, reluctantly agrees to cooperate, and the two form an uneasy union as they troop through forests and grassland, courting death at the hands of machine-gun-happy rebels