Digger: Arty Intentions Gone Bad

129 minutes; rated R; directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu Critic's Grade: C

You know that bright friend, the one with great credentials and an impressive professional resume, driven by passion for an admirable cause, who shows up at the party and browbeats guests so aggressively and so relentlessly regarding his or her favorite hobby horse that everyone is left hoping never again to encounter their odd new acquaintance?

"Digger," a Tom Cruise vehicle from gifted, ambitious, Oscar-winning filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu ("The Revenant," "Birdman," "Amores Perros"), is kind of like that. Iñárritu, taking his cues from Stanley Kubrick's black-and-white Atomic Age masterpiece "Dr. Strangelove," with too many variously overt and oblique references to count, clearly has unbridled passion for spreading the gospel about the very real threat of climate change.

His fervor, however, translates into a broad, heavy-handed satire that, as opposed to Kubrick's prophetic and frequently riotously funny gem, elicits only occasion chuckles and is sure to have a limited shelf life. Like its protagonist, Texas oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, played by Cruise in the same over-the-top register that informed his turn as a pretentious, barking studio executive in "Tropic Thunder," "Digger" feels, well, overbearing, pompous and plain weird (any resemblance to a certain dementia-addled, orange-skinned world leader is strictly coincidental, of course). The film isn't likely to convince anyone to join the director's cause.

The film, like its protagonist, appears to be trying hard to be annoying and relentlessly full of itself. And it thoroughly succeeds on all counts. Is it intriguing to see $600 million man Cruise take a break from his interchangeable action-icon roles and commit himself entirely to portraying an outlandish, abrasive character, putting himself in the hands of a legit, high-end auteur? Theoretically, yes. Does Cruise get an "A" for effort? Nope.

Digger, an aging, greying, paunchy billionaire who speaks with a George Bush accent, typically dresses in a Western suit, bolo tie and designer cowboy boots when he's out in public. He spends much of his life ensconced in his sprawling, gawdy, Southwestern-themed mansion, making his way up and down broad flights of stairs and through cavernous rooms, where mirrors are festooned with antlers and upside-down stuffed gators cling to cathedral ceilings. He possesses all the trappings of success that money could buy, aside from a significant other with whom to share his life.

Evenings, he cuddles with his dying, decaying, one-eyed cat Maggie, a decades-old feline played, bizarrely enough, by some type of robotic puppet. His days are devoted to yapping, screaming and stomping nonstop at his underlings and associates, his large staff of household helpers and his sister Emma (Sandra Huller), head of a sustainable energy company — essentially a greenwashing outfit — that's a subsidiary of Rockwell. Digger's wingmen include his company's head of environmental safety, scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) and, frequently lurking nearby, Vice President Fryman (Michael Stuhlbarg).

Alas, into every robber baron's life a little rain must come. That unwelcome interruption arrives with news that Digger's oil drills in the Arctic, where his billion-dollar rig and 32 workers pump 9,000 barrels a day, have caused an enormous ice crack. The subsequent methane explosion, killing all employees aboard the drilling platform, has loosed a massive Greenland ice shelf that is headed straight to the Norwegian coast. There, it's expected to cause a tsunami that will result in hundreds of thousands of deaths and untold human misery in northern Europe and beyond.

Of course, the coming humanitarian disaster has been decades in the making and was preventable. Digger nevertheless forged ahead with his moneymaking initiatives, thanks in part to a cancer-stricken President Compson (John Goodman, permanently apoplectic) who is all too happy to turn a blind eye to environmental abuses when it serves his financial and political interests.

Compson's military chief of staff, war hawk General Fitzgerald, not unlike that one real-life US defense secretary and, of course, George C. Scott's gloriously named Buck Turgidson in "Dr. Strangelove," has a quick and easy nuclear-powered solution: He wants to blow it up real good. The Compson administration, too, intends to obscure its culpability by building a public relations "firewall," eliminating any disturbing words from public discussion of the crisis. George Orwell's "Newspeak," anyone?

The film's most impressive sequence, the peak of Cruise's performance, occurs when Digger willingly throws himself to the European Parliament. In a bellowing, increasingly manic speech, on a circle-in-the-round stage, he takes full responsibility for the ongoing crisis. Then he does a double reverse, shifting the blame to all world leaders and their reliance on fossil fuels. The inevitable earth-destroying results of nonstop oil production and other environmental intrusions amount to "the cost of doing business," he proclaims. "You want freedom to bask in the comfort of your unsustainable life. Oil is the mother's milk of earth." It's the movie's most honest moment.

Iñárritu up-ends his narrative with a pair of surprise perception-shifting twists best left unexplained here. Let's just say that they encompass a separate but related story, one involving a theatrical producer portrayed by the always reliable Jesse Plemons, a play titled "Fossil Fools" and details about the state of the world on the heels of the disaster caused by Digger's company. It also concerns questions about the place in time of the events that we're seeing. It's a creative gambit that ultimately does little to elevate "Digger" from oddball curio to anything more substantial, or watchable.

Copyright 2026 by Philip Booth. All rights reserved.