‘Digger’ Review: Tom Cruise Buries Himself Alive and Somehow Keeps Shouting

Tom Cruise spends most of ‘Digger’ under heavy makeup, barely recognizable as Digger Rockwell, a Texas oilman whose fortune has convinced him that the rules of reality are optional. The film arrives from Warner Bros. in theaters on Friday, October 2, with Alejandro G. Iñárritu directing and sharing screenplay credit with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone and Sabina Berman. It runs 129 minutes and carries an R rating.

The setup is a disaster movie wearing a satirist’s tuxedo. An explosion at one of Digger’s drilling rigs near the Arctic sends a huge shelf of ice drifting toward Europe, where the flooding promises to be catastrophic. Digger, meanwhile, is more concerned with his sickly white cat than with the apocalypse he has helped set in motion.

Then the film starts to reveal what it really is, and I will keep that to myself because the surprise is the one thing ‘Digger’ has that nobody else can give you. What I can say is that the movie plays a risky game with its own structure, and it took me about half an hour to decide whether I was being invited into a joke or locked inside one. That uncertainty is the most fascinating stretch of the picture, and it is also where my patience began to drain.

Because here is the problem. Iñárritu has built a film about loud, self-righteous political theater, and then he presents enormous amounts of it at full volume. Scene after scene is a shouting match in which characters announce the moral of the story directly to the camera, and the point about how tiresome that style can be gets made in the first act and then made again, and again, and again.

The cast is not to blame, and this is where I want to be fair. Cruise commits completely, tossing out a Texan drawl and a bully’s swagger with the ease of a man who has never doubted himself, and it is thrilling to watch him take on something so far from his usual action hero mold. Riz Ahmed, playing the scientist Dr. Ganesh, finds sly comic angles that the script around him rarely rewards, and John Goodman’s President Compson has a blustery warmth that stays entertaining even when the scenes grow exhausting.

Then there is the craft, which is frankly magnificent. The mansion interiors are cold and gorgeous, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki gives the gloom a sculpted, painterly texture, and Cosmo Sheldrake’s score thunders through the theater like a dare. I just wish all that muscle had been pointed at a story with a little more tenderness and a little less sneer.

The satire also has a blind spot, because it skewers smug preachy movies such as ‘Don’t Look Up’ while behaving in a remarkably similar way. By the time the credits rolled I admired the nerve, the production design and two or three performances, but I felt more bludgeoned than provoked. A movie can swing big and still whiff, and this one whiffs with tremendous style.

My final word is that ‘Digger’ is a fascinating misfire that I am glad exists and have no urgent desire to sit through again. Cruise and the craftspeople deserve real credit, yet the film drowns its best ideas in noise and mistakes volume for insight, so I land at 5 out of 10.

Did ‘Digger’ strike you as a bold swing or a colossal mess, and does Tom Cruise deserve the awards talk, so tell me in the comments whether you agree with my verdict.