In 1999, Tom Cruise earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnola while simultaneously headlining (alongside then-wife Nicole Kidman) Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. It was a titanic auteur-driven twofer for the Hollywood icon, and yet within a few years, he’d largely abandon serious drama in favor of solidifying his status as the industry’s reigning action superstar.
That he was good-to-great in most of those slam-bang spectaculars was inarguable. Nonetheless, it was mildly disappointing to see him relegate himself to a single cinematic register when, as numerous prior efforts proved, he was more than just one thing.
Digger is thus a significant course correction for Cruise—a large-scale black comedy that hinges on a performance devoid of running, jumping, flying, fighting, or any similar feat of awe-inspiring derring-do. Plastered with prosthetics to play an aging oil tycoon who triggers a global crisis, Cruise gives an off-the-wall turn that’s all kooky bug eyes, cocky insensitivity, and southern-friend bluster.
It’s a turn that requires him to flex muscles that haven’t been utilized in years, and unsurprisingly, given his magnetism and sense of humor, it’s a reminder that he’s a versatile artist as well as a marquee movie star.
Too bad the film is a catastrophe.
Partnering with two-time Best Director Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu (in his follow-up to the dismal Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), Digger (Oct. 2, in theaters) is a tedious satire, slamming capitalistic greed, anti-environmental profiteering, rampant corruption, and horrid narcissism with all the bluntness of the shovel its protagonist reveres.
Like Adam McKay’s star-studded 2021 flameout Don’t Look Up, it’s a film with its heart in the right place and yet less than no grace and subtlety. The result is a faux-funny cautionary tale that’s akin to sitting in a lecture hall listening to a fervent “The Sky Is Falling” sermon that grows less persuasive with each new shrill warning.
Digger’s kookiness begins with an opening shot of its protagonist, paunchy, gray-haired Digger Rockwell (Cruise), sitting in his ornate bed in silk pajamas beneath a giant chandelier and near an enormous window that looks out on what appears to be a painted landscape. That view’s artificiality is echoed by his beloved white cat, a sickly—and clearly animatronic—feline he tries to feed with food kept in his nightstand drawer, served on his pinky finger.
Before more than a few words are spoken, Iñárritu has set a totally unreal tone, and though it quickly takes a backseat to all sorts of helter-skelter pandemonium, it’s apparent that something is off about everything taking place in the tycoon’s mansion.
A trek through that locale provides views of innumerable stuffed animals that suggest Digger is an old-school heartland conservative, and on a call with an employee at his Greenland oil-drilling rig, his demanding demeanor underlines that he’s used to getting what he wants. Unfortunately, despite his belief that “perception is reality,” he can’t change the rapidly unfolding emergency: Due to an underwater leak, his rig explodes, causing a piece of the ice shelf to break off and creating a mammoth iceberg that’s headed straight for Europe.
As his environmental head of safety and security Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) reports, the consequence of this calamity will be millions of displaced, hundreds of thousands of fatalities, and trillions in damages.
Digger is smart enough to realize that all of this will fall at his feet, and during a meeting with the nation’s president (John Goodman), that point is hammered home, along with typical “jokes” about Americans thinking they’re the best and that the smartest course of action is annihilating military action.
Iñárritu’s script (co-written with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, and Sabina Berman) is obvious and, worse, unoriginal, with each character a familiar caricature, whether the wimpy and rational Ganesh, the crazy and self-interested commander-in-chief, or Digger himself. Shot with dexterous soft-focus luminosity by Emmanuel Lubezki, Digger captures its characters at exaggerated angles that heighten their cartoonish nature, and so too do countless scenes in which yelling, shrieking, and freaking out are the order of the day.
As Digger attempts to contain this calamity and, with it, his fortune (and the American economy which relies on it), Digger whips itself into a perpetual frenzy. Yet it makes the classic error of mistaking commotion for comedy, and despite Cruise’s committed embodiment of the magnate—whose confidence is rooted in his fundamental conviction that he isn’t the bad guy—the material is torturously unamusing.
Be it Sandra Hüller as Digger’s green energy-loving sister or Michael Stuhlbarg as the spineless vice-president, everyone is cut off at the knees by strident spoofery designed to speak to the choir, and that extends to Jesse Plemmons as a weirdo Digger admirer whose true nature isn’t divulged until relatively late in this game.
Digger’s prolonged speech to an angry assembly about the hypocrisy of fossil fuel critics is a tour-de-force for Cruise, allowing him to chew scenery with maniacal gusto. The rest of Digger, alas, is tiresome beyond reason, skewering easy targets with dull jabs about the ruling elite’s heartless selfishness, which, in the case of climate change, makes them nothing short of murderers.
Over the course of 128 wearisome minutes, Iñárritu neither elicits a single laugh nor stumbles upon a novel way of making his impassioned case—even when, after an introductory half hour, he reveals that there’s more to his latest than meets the eye.
To avoid spoiling Digger’s central twist, all that can be said about that bombshell is that it involves the same brand of self-referentiality that undid the director’s prior feature, adding a meta layer to the proceedings that does nothing to strengthen any of its elements and ambitions. Casting the film as not only a censure of environmental criminality (and the baseline villainy that enables it), but also a portrait of art’s power to address such misdeeds, process grief, and help people transcend their fury and misery, Iñárritu’s formal gambit is merely an additional vehicle for preachiness.
Digger has boldness in spades but zero delicacy, wit, or insight that might justify its goofy chaos and madness. Equal parts Looney Tunes farce, earnest screed, and back-patting gimmick, it’s a disaster almost on par with the one its protagonist incites—and, consequently, not the film that’ll get Cruise back on dramatic track.
