‘Digger’ Review: Tom Cruise Buries Himself in Latex and Chaos

‘Digger‘ arrives in theaters on October 2 as the first film Tom Cruise has made outside the ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Mission Impossible’ franchises since 2017. It is also Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s first English language feature since ‘The Revenant’, and Warner Bros. has sold it with a great deal of mystery.

Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon who lives in a mansion crowded with taxidermy and lavishes his tenderness on an ailing cat named Maggie. When his Arctic drilling operation sends up warnings, he waves them off, right up until an explosion sends a glacier drifting toward Europe. What follows is a scramble in which the most powerful man alive tries to cast himself as the hero of a catastrophe he caused.

That premise is the strongest thing about ‘Digger’, and it is also where my frustrations begin. I admired this film far more often than I enjoyed it. The idea of a comedy about a man who simply cannot imagine being at fault is sharp, but the execution keeps mistaking volume for insight.

Almost every line of dialogue is delivered at a shout, and for the first stretch the noise has a manic charm. By the halfway point the yelling stops feeling like a comic choice and starts feeling like weather, something you sit through rather than laugh at. Iñárritu wrote the script with his ‘Birdman’ collaborators Nicolás Giacobone and Alexander Dinelaris, along with Sabina Berman, and you can feel a room full of clever people daring one another to go bigger. Bigger is not the same as funnier.

Cruise, to his enormous credit, is fearless. Buried under heavy prosthetics and playing a man who has never heard the word no, he is obnoxious in exactly the way the role demands, and his big monologue is the best scene in the film. Nobody could accuse him of protecting his image here, and that alone makes the performance worth seeing.

The supporting bench is deep, with John Goodman as President Compson, Riz Ahmed as a scientist named Ganesh, and Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons all in the mix. The script rarely lets them be more than voices in the storm. Somewhere in the middle the story also takes a surreal turn that reframes everything around it, and I will say only that it is bold, divisive and never fully earns the weight it wants to carry.

Technically, this is a handsome piece of work. The production design is lavish and strange, and Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography gives even the ugliest rooms a painterly glow. Yet all that polish sits on top of a film that keeps its characters at arm’s length, so even as tidal waves loom I never felt much for anyone. The satire has teeth, but the heart is mostly missing.

I came away impressed by the ambition and worn out by the delivery. ‘Digger’ is a messy, overstuffed and often exhausting swing, but it is a swing, and Cruise’s commitment carries it further than it has any right to go. I give it 6.5 out of 10.

Did ‘Digger’ work for you as a satire, or did the shouting drown it out, and does Cruise deserve an award for this performance, so tell me in the comments whether you agree with my verdict?