Digger: an unwieldy but compulsively watchable satire

For the first time in a long time, Tom Cruise is acting his age. The last time we saw Cruise on screen, he was clinging onto an airplane in his Mission: Impossible swansong The Final Reckoning (2025); in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, his headline-grabbing stunt is portraying a man in his mid-60s. Performing behind a wrinkled fat suit and tufts of unkept white hair, Cruise is Digger Rockwell, an ageing Texan oil tycoon who cares for nothing but the money flowing in from his wells and his unnervingly mangy pet cat; other animals don’t earn the same empathy, as evidenced by the countless taxidermied creatures decorating every inch of his mansion. Digger is finally forced to face the consequences of his actions when his rapacious drilling in Greenland causes an ecological catastrophe that could kill millions. After saving the world so many times, Cruise is now playing one of its destroyers. 

We learn all this in a chaotic opening half-hour, where characters and plot points are hurled aggressively at the audience and everything is pitched at maximum volume. A splenetic John Goodman appears as the ailing US President, shirking responsibility for this disaster and leaving Digger to take charge; Sandra Hüller marches in to shout at Digger and then marches out again, spending the rest of the film adrift in a superfluous role; Michael Stuhlbarg screams a lot and vomits. Riz Ahmed’s more nuanced comedic work as the scientist tasked with breaking the cataclysmic news is welcome in a film that is chronically unfunny for long stretches. Everyone is clearly putting their all into making Digger hilarious, but all we can see is the sweat and the strain. We can glimpse a poster for To Be or Not to Be (1942) – a film that found sparkling comedy amid bleak times – in the backdrop of one scene, but there’s nothing like the Lubitsch touch in Iñárritu’s bludgeoning direction. 

Then Iñárritu pulls the rug from under us. Everything we’ve been watching is a stage play being rehearsed in a cavernous theatre, with Cruise now playing Curtis Markson, an actor who frequently questions his director over the bombastic tone and factual inaccuracy of the piece. Iñárritu cuts back-and-forth between this backstage drama (a poster for Cassavetes’ Opening Night [1977] is also visible) and the over-the-top satire they’re presenting, but there’s not enough time given to these scenes for Markson’s concerns about the material to feel like anything more than cheap self-referential gags.

As unwieldy, unsubtle and unfunny as it frequently is, Digger remains compulsively watchable, and there’s plenty to admire in its audacity and craft. The detailed and imaginative production design by Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson is brilliantly accentuated by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who uses VistaVision’s 1.50:1 aspect ratio to compose a succession of unusual and arresting images. The grey-faced members representing a United Nations-like council feel more akin to a Roy Andersson film than a major studio star vehicle, and it’s to this audience that Cruise delivers his most barnstorming display. His monologue, which defends oil drilling and lambasts the hypocrisy of modern society, is Digger’s version of the “Greed is good” speech from Wall Street (1987). Cruise delivers it with the showboating swagger that we saw in Magnolia (1999) and it’s exciting to watch him working in this register again. This may not be one of his great performances, but he does succeed in bringing texture and charisma to a cartoonish role, and the fact that Cruise – who has always been carefully apolitical – has chosen to make a climate change film that attacks American arrogance and corporate responsibility is fascinating in itself.  

In Digger’s final act, Iñárritu and his writers (Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, Sabina Berman and Jez Butterworth) throw in one more major twist. This development changes the context of the film and gives a greater sense of shape and purpose to a lot of what has gone before, but it also brings the whole existence of Iñárritu’s film into question. What purpose does it serve to watch a piece of art reflecting our dire circumstances, only to walk back out into that hellscape two hours later, as powerless as ever? Digger even references the phrase first coined by Neil Postman four decades ago: when we watch films like this, are we just amusing ourselves to death? If that’s the case, then one wishes the film was a good deal more amusing. 

► Digger is in UK cinemas now.