EW review: 'Blood Diamond' doesn't make cut

Story Highlights

• "Blood Diamond" too didactic
• "Holiday" a letdown after director's "Something's Gotta Give"
• "Unaccompanied Minors" wastes talent

By Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly

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(Entertainment Weekly) -- Righteous indignation is exhausting in a movie -- maybe not for the indignant, but certainly for the unsuspecting moviegoing bystander in the path of all that onrushing rectitude.

"Blood Diamond," set in Sierra Leone, makes a big show of dramatic twists, linking the fates of a white African diamond smuggler, a black African fisherman, and an American journalist in a series of perils set to trumpety action music. But the movie's message is static, medicinal: Don't buy blood diamonds (also known as conflict diamonds, for the bloody African civil wars their sales subsidize). Don't do business with companies that sell blood diamonds. And don't forget to enjoy the chase scenes.

You may not want to eat popcorn under the circumstances.

Anyhow, don't say you haven't been thoroughly briefed about what blood diamonds are, not after 132 educational minutes of Djimon Hounsou looking stricken as forced laborer Solomon Vandy (hiding a diamond as big as the Ritz and trying to rescue his scattered family); Leonardo DiCaprio looking conflicted as mercenary Danny Archer (angling to sell Solomon's stone); and Jennifer Connelly looking idealistic but wily as Maddy Bowen (a magazine writer out to report a story no other newshound in America apparently cares about).

"You might catch a minute of this on CNN somewhere between sports and weather," she lectures, her flashing eyes turned toward DiCaprio but her words aimed at the audience, or perhaps The Huffington Post.

Even though Connelly's Maddy is the dewiest warzone lady since MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield traipsed off to Afghanistan, she alone can prove that big business is complicit in these dirty dealings. The chemistry between the Lois Lane and Han Solo of the Dark Continent is unstable at best. Hounsou does better as a soul on fire.

Edward Zwick, who directed from an explicatory script by Charles Leavitt ("K-PAX"), has called himself a "perpetual student"; his previous honors-class movies include "Glory," "Courage Under Fire," and "The Last Samurai." There is every reason to learn about the link between jewels and death, by all means, but no reason to try to disguise a term paper as entertainment.

EW Grade: C+

'The Holiday'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

It may not be proof that miracles do happen, but with "Something's Gotta Give" (2003), the writer-director Nancy Meyers took a leap from the processed screwball of movies like her 2000 hit "What Women Want" to something zesty and stirring and wittily adult. It's as if Rachael Ray had blossomed into Alice Waters.

Now Meyers is back with "The Holiday," and I'm sad to report that it's just a cookie-cutter chick flick, albeit one made with some fancy butter and powdered frosting.

Why cookie-cutter? Because of the too self-consciously "old-fashioned" Nora Ephron premise: Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet as neurotic singletons, one a highly stressed Los Angeles editor of movie trailers, the other a deeply tender London newspaper reporter, who agree over the Internet to swap homes for Christmas vacation. (Watch Diaz and Winslet get earthy )

Because of the grating, insecurity-lit-up-in-neon way that Diaz overplays the role of a too-organized, high-functioning, no-tears yuppie who keeps imagining her life as a blockbuster trailer of romantic cliches -- except that the schlocky fantasy trailer doesn't look all that different from the movie we're watching.

Because of the way that Winslet, as a woman devoted to a scoundrel (Rufus Sewell) who doesn't love her, lays on the sub-Bridget Jones dithering until you practically have to squint to believe that a 21st-century woman this beautiful could be this much of a doormat.

And because of how each actress gets one embarrassing rock & roll air-guitar scene. And I haven't even mentioned the men.

Okay, I know that male movie critics aren't allowed to complain that a chick flick is formulaic; it would be like me griping that the latest issue of Cosmo includes too many Wild Lovemaking Positions You've Never Seen Before. Yet I now officially expect more from Nancy Meyers.

There's no denying her facility, though. The dialogue has a perky synthetic sheen, and with the exception of Diaz, Meyers brings out the best in her actors -- Winslet, her sexy vulnerability aglow; Jack Black, as the film-score composer who woos her, dialing down his mad energy to reveal the sweetness beneath; and Jude Law, as Diaz's suitor, too chivalrous to resist as a man too good to be true.

So eat up, chick-flickaholics! Even if you know it's not good for you.

EW Grade: B-

'Unaccompanied Minors'

Reviewed by Gregory Kirschling

Many unaccompanied grown-ups are probably psyched to go see the kiddie-league comedy "Unaccompanied Minors." Its director, Paul Feig, was the head mind behind TV's cult classic "Freaks and Geeks," the wise and wholly mature evocation of painful high-schooldom.

Feig has the capacity to work well with children while also speaking directly to adults -- which is why the strictly-for-kids "Minors" feels like a botch.

During Christmas week, six preteens from "Breakfast Club" walks of life get stranded in a snowed-in Midwestern airport, and the movie quickly establishes itself as precisely the poorly done kind of Hollywood fantasy where almost every adult in the building promptly falls asleep in the waiting areas, as if this were a zombie film.

Practically the only one still vertical enough to chase the scamps around is the airport honcho played by "The Daily Show's" Lewis Black, who was not meant to deliver his usual apoplexy to children. He is not that funny; nor are any of the movie's many cameo performers (including a few players from "The Office" and "Arrested Development"); nor is the film as a whole. When, near the end, Rob Corddry gets an out-of-nowhere chuckle by goofing on the "down-low" nature of a high five from the little girl playing his kid, it registers more like a shock than a laugh.

Feig does wring out a few fleeting fun/heartfelt moments from the minors, and the movie's Christmas treacle is smoother than "Santa Clause 3's." But anyone old enough to go see this without a parent or guardian will have seen it all before.

EW Grade: C+

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