Film Reviews

October 2, 2026

The trailer for "Digger" admittedly sparked my interest. It was essentially a two-and-a-half-minute montage of Tom Cruise's legendary filmography, and it made it seem like this new film was going to serve as a sort of radical culmination of his 40-plus-years Hollywood career. But, as it is, the most astounding thing about "Digger" is just how much of a mess it is. Not only does it star and was produced by Cruise, who is usually so adept when it comes to making high-quality, spare-no-expense entertainment, it was also directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, whose own name is justifiably tied to projects that are considered exemplary ("Birdman," "The Revenant"). "Digger" just goes to show that every film is an isolated incident, and that we can't assume any artist's superb previous efforts necessarily guarantee their new ones will be of the same caliber.

Where to begin? As early as the opening scene, something about "Digger" feels off. There's something cold, puzzling, and off-putting about the tone and presentation, but not in an interesting way. Emmanuel Lubezki's bleached cinematography and Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson overwhelming production design work to manifest this strange and piercing world, which is supposed to be zany and comical but ends up feeling hollow.

It opens with Cruise's titular character, the silver-haired and near-balding Digger Rockwell, a billionaire oil tycoon, waking up in his towering, castle-like mansion alongside his beloved white cat, Maggie, who is intentionally animatronic. Right away, I was already scratching my head as the heavily made-up Cruise—pale, balding, and assembled with a prosthetic belly—telling his maid, in a thick Southern accent, that Maggie has once again soiled the bed. The scene is weird and unamusing, and already the film has created a distance between itself and the audience, and it's only a couple minutes into its two-hour runtime. Nevertheless, our instincts are to give "Digger" the benefit of the doubt and hope that it will find its footing.

Unfortunately, the film gets more lost, disjointed, and frankly, frustrating, as it plods along. Perhaps it's because Digger is painted as an amalgamation of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Dick Cheney (take your pick of loud, deplorable, self-serving liars), or maybe it's because the four-person screenplay—Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, Sabina Berman—makes it too apparent the kind of egotistical, unfit people it's taking aim at, leaving little room for nuance and complexity. The screenwriters should have known it's not all that funny to lampoon people we might already categorize as cartoons because cartoons are inherently absurd and exaggerated. Their script merely ends up underscoring the obvious.

One of the film's overstated agendas is sending up fossil fuel opportunists and their equally reprehensible bedfellows, essentially portraying them as short-sighted, overweight, money-hungry white men. When Digger learns that his oil company's drilling efforts in Greenland and Alaska have caused large sections of the mainland to siphon off, he meets with the U.S. President (John Goodman), who approved of the drilling, and his own team of yes men, among them a cowardly Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg) and a macho military general (Robert John Burke). They all dismiss the data presented by Environmental Safety Chief Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), who claims the broken land masses will cause enormous tidal waves and global devastation should they collide with other continents. In fact, the president is less concerned about impending death and destruction and more about his rectal cancer, which I guess is supposed to be funny because it's "rectal" cancer.

With all its talks about world catastrophes and using nuclear weapons as a quick fix, the film's clear inspiration is "Dr. Strangelove," Stanley Kubrick's wicked Cold War satire about putting inept leaders in charge of arms races and existential crises. However, that film had the benefit of being novel, more focused, and confidently understated. "Digger" is in our face and ends up being "too much" of everything.

*SPOILER ALERT*

Because its initial setup is so over-the-top, derivative, and a bit of a comic dead zone, it's hard to believe Cruise or Iñárritu would have signed off on it. Surely there must be more to this movie. And so, just when we think we'll have to trudge through “Digger” for another two hours, the story pivots and we learn that what we're watching is not the film's own reality but rather a performance of one.

It turns out that Digger and the other players are just that: players. They make up the cast of a play called "Fossil Fools" and soon the artificial-looking and wobbly sets are being walked around by the play's crew, stage manager (Sophie Wilde), and producers, among them Kenny (Jesse Plemons), who greatly admires Cruise's actor character, Curtis Markson, who's younger than his fictional counterpart and fortunately speaks without an accent. Markson also has a wife (Annabel Mullion) and daughter, the latter of whom is en route by plane, although the plane has gone missing, which creates its own drama that doesn’t really pay off.

Markson and company are actually in the middle of a dress rehearsal for “Fossil Fools” and the introduction of them as actors and this side of "Digger" comes as a relief because it means the play-within-the-movie we were just watching was at least intended to be loud, annoying, and highly exaggerated. Maybe, we think, "Digger" can be saved by its other personality.

Unfortunately, despite playing and shifting between two different planes of reality, or perhaps because of it, we still feel detached and apathetic toward "Digger." It just can't establish a comical, emotional, or social connection to us. Watching it, we feel flummoxed, and because we're given little time to invest in any of the characters, who transition back and forth between their on and off-stage personas, or their situations, we question what the film brings to the table—as a story, a political commentary, or an interesting technical exercise.

I'm sure Iñárritu and Cruise, both reputable storytellers and lovers of the cinematic art form, genuinely felt that what they were making was affecting, useful, and entertaining, and the filmmakers' collective efforts and ambitions aren't lost on us, but "Digger" is simply a bloated misfire. The play-within-the-film sections are especially slogging because it’s scene after scene of characters yelling, bickering, getting drunk, stumbling over, and not telling us anything new, insightful, or interesting about politicians or plutocrats (Sandra Hüller, as Digger's moral-minded half-sister, provides a short respite from the madness). Its uses grotesque and boring stereotypes to get the film's points across, and "Fossil Fools" never becomes a play we'd ever want to see in real life, no matter how much we may agree with its lampooning of world leaders who care more about image and power than the planet and sustainability.

And over on the "real" world side, it's comparatively dry, with Markson and the other characters' personal struggles not being especially compelling, which is no doubt due to our feeling like we haven't been given enough time to get to know them.

It's sort of remarkable that "Digger" ends up being such a grind. It's not exactly dull because we’re always wondering where it’s taking us, but even so, after a while, we don't really care. We can appreciate that it must have been a challenge to try to realize everything the filmmakers wanted into a contained, accessible, and worthwhile experience, but the simple fact of the matter is they failed, and because it's Cruise and Iñárritu, it's hard to shake this failure hits harder than most.