There's also Col. Coetzee (Arnold Vosloo), Archer's former commander who sells guns to the RUF and is now hired by the government to help eradicate the rebel force. Maddy's importance to the story is fundamental, as she becomes somewhat of a moral compass for the audience. At one point, the trio of Archer, Solomon, and Maddy encounter a refugee camp of about a million homeless people. She comments that there'll be about a minute of this kind of coverage on CNN in between sports and weather. When Archer tries to debunk her reporting by talking about American women's demand for what he helps supply, she retorts that not all women want a storybook wedding with a large diamond, just like all Africans don't kill each other. It's an important reminder, since most of the action sequences contain Africans killing each other.

Part of the movie's problem, then, is that we need a character to express in words what the movie fails for the most part to show. The one instance of a sympathetic character within the bloodshed is Benjamin (Basil Wallace), who helps former child soldiers recover, but even he becomes a victim of the violence. The violence itself—as gruesome as it is—is unfortunately underplayed by uncomfortably shoving it into an action formula. Innocent people are gunned down by both sides of the conflict in one sequence set in the city streets, but the movie focuses on Archer and Solomon and their escape. Clearly, the movie is not an in-depth analysis of the situation at hand, but that does not make its attempts to garner thrills from tragedy any less questionable. There's even the conceit of a villain, here in the form of Captain Poison (David Harewood), who is injured during the raid in which Solomon is arrested and becomes Dia's commander. He is even given a distinguishing physical trait in the form of one eye, just to remind us that he is the villain. What the movie gets right, without any kind of attempts that might exploit, is the depiction of the training of child soldiers. It's a frightening portrait, and the film's conclusion tells us there are still some 200,000 child soldiers in Africa.

Blood Diamond is crafted with skill, and the fact that it will bring attention to a few important international issues that otherwise might not reach a wide audience is an inherent good. Leonardo DiCaprio is convincingly treacherous in a layered performance and gives the piece a level of moral ambiguity, and Djimon Hounsou turns in an impassioned performance. But the question is not whether Blood Diamond succeeds as a mature, politically-minded piece of entertainment but whether it should be an entertainment in the first place.