Ever heard that old saying, this meeting could have been an email? Similarly, rather than being a film, Digger could have been a burning bag of dog poop delivered to Adam McKay’s doorstep. A seeming broadside at heavy-handed Hollywood advocacy flops like Don’t Look Up, it’s a scathing pastiche of everything that makes such movies insufferably sanctimonious. Yet Birdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s obvious technical genius as a filmmaker cannot overcome the plain fact that Digger is both insufferable and sanctimonious.
Sanctimony is not a trait one can find in Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise). Under a layer of latex, Cruise imbues the ludicrous Texas oil man with braggadocious life, whether he’s bringing the President of the United States (John Goodman) to heel or scolding the one scientist (Riz Ahmed) who dares point out that his drill, baby, drill business model is dooming the world – first through fire, then through ice. It’s grandiose stuff, but also patently as absurd and artificial as Digger’s ancient cat. Indeed, the artifice is so obvious that it’s clear before Digger’s first big reveal that this is more than a blunt eco-satire.
It’s also clearly Cruise’s first real attempt in decades – arguably, since Magnolia – to prove that he is an actor rather than a performer. His persona as the Last Movie Star has overshadowed any hint of character building for decades, and so it’s crushingly depressing that this is the project he has chosen to express that aspect of himself in after so long.
The first trailer for Digger was a “greatest hits” assemblage of memorable Cruise moments since Tap in 1981. It was supposed to establish that this was to be the multi-time acting Oscar nominee drawing on all those performances, from the charismatic to the comedic and especially the cosmetic-covered, to create his greatest role yet. Instead, the film’s most and arguably only emotionally earnest moment is instead delivered by Jesse Plemons under a quite outrageous ginger wig. Cruise gets to deliver some big speeches, including one that is seemingly supposed to be his Oscar-ready grand Shakespearean soliloquy, but for all their fireworks they illuminate little.
In more intimate and sentimental moments, Cruise falls back on his old trick of talking low and clearly, like he’s lecturing a recalcitrant child. Yet perhaps he’s the one that needs sterner guidance. Maybe it’s that those acting muscles have atrophied, and Cruise needed a more unforgiving director of actors to really form the character. Or maybe it’s that Iñárritu never gives Digger the wiliness and insight that it requires. The geopolitics of the story seem mired in a pre-Glasnost Cold War view that invite unflattering comparisons to Dr. Strangelove, making Cruise a poor man’s Peter Sellers without the callousness or complexity required to make Digger truly loathsome.
Moreover, this being Iñárritu, there are unseen layers that unfurl or, in one major revelation, abruptly erupt through the narrative. His actual intention is nothing so obvious as a ham-fisted satire of ham-fisted satires, but an attempt to examine the value of grandiose art – most especially theatrical performance – as a tool for political debate. It definitely seems like an odd discussion for Iñárritu to launch into, but it also becomes clear that, when it comes to deconstructing works of the scale and ambition of Nixon in China or Angels in America, Iñárritu has shockingly little insight. That’s even when, like Cruise, he relies on his own old tricks. In his case, it’s having characters annunciate the subtext as blindingly obvious text. If he was attempting to lampoon McKay’s increasingly lumpen and bombastic didacticism, he simply ends up aping its boorishness.
Maybe Cruise and Iñárritu are a perfect pairing. There is no denying their underlying skill, their ability to captivate the camera and create works that are superficially scintillating. Yet the end result is rendered inert by their own overbearing narcissism. In its attempt to be great art, Digger becomes neither great nor art.
Digger
2026, R, 129 min. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Starring Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Robert John Burke.
