Leonardo Di Caprio's new political adventure film, BLOOD DIAMOND, directed by politically minded filmmaker Ed Zwick (GLORY) sticks with you long after you've seen it. But, what sticks with you? The acting? No. The one dimensional characters? No. The romance or the drama of the story? No.

What one comes away with is remorse. The tragedy of Sierra Leone's recent fighting, its slaughters, and its child soldiers is barely out of the headlines, and now it's up on screen as a big budget action film with major stars. If you are going to make the big version of the story of Sierra Leone's disaster, you need to make the manufactured story compelling. HOTEL RWANDA did this very well about another African tragedy. Unfortunately, BLOOD DIAMOND does not.

At first, we separately follow the stories of Djimon Honsou (AMISTAD) and smuggler Di Caprio. Honsou is a fisherman and family man, whose character is defined by the fact that he is a good person. His world is turned upside down when he is kidnapped by revolutionaries, who turn him into a slave in a diamond mine. Meanwhile, Di Caprio smuggles diamonds to neighboring Liberia, so that they can be legally exported. When Di Caprio and Honsou meet in prison, Di Caprio finds out about the giant diamond Honsou buried back in the jungle, and he wants in. Just to round things out, Jennifer Connelly is the obligatory romantic interest for Di Caprio, an adventure seeking journalist, who helps Di Caprio learn about the humanity he left behind when ­ Oh, wait. His deep secret comes out much later, as Connelly leans in close and touches her hand to him and he fights back tears.

Feel like you've seen that scene already? You have. You've also seen the scene where Honsou, reunited with his brainwashed revolutionary son, has to face him at gunpoint, and talk him out of shooting his own dad, by reminding him of memories, like playing with the cows. In fact, you've seen most of the scenes.

And the coincidences? The first time Di Caprio and Connelly meet in a bar, she wants information out of him for a story, but his mouth stays shut. Soon, we are supposed to believe that his slowly developing sense of honor is enough to draw her to him. I didn't buy it for a second.

They're almost easy to forget those when faced with a careless number of coincidences. I say careless, because a quick revision of the script could easily have explained away many of them.
"That's what one million refugees look like," declares Connelly, the film's conscience, as she brings the two men to where the rest of Honsou's family is kept. Sure enough, a little later, wife and daughters, out of millions, just happen by. Later, as Honsou looks for his son, he and Di Caprio come across a pocket of revolutionaries in the jungle. Honsou just knows his son, one of thousands of kidnapped boys is there. Yep, he is. And, of course, as thousands are shot in various battles, the leads run and duck better than anyone else, because they don't even get grazed by a bullet.