Digger Review - Tom Cruise’s Most Fascinating Swing
There is a scene midway through Digger in which Tom Cruise, playing an aging oil tycoon with a prosthetic paunch and a Texas twang thick enough to spread on toast, tries to coax his environmental scientist into sampling some absurdly expensive tuna aboard a private jet while the fate of a collapsing Greenland ice shelf hangs over both their heads, and the tension between Cruise’s genuine, unforced charisma and the moral rot of the character wearing it – is both the most fascinating thing about Digger and the reason the film never quite coheres into the masterpiece it is clearly aiming to be. This is a confounding movie. It is also, more often than not, a captivating one, and the gap between those two reactions is where most audiences will end up living for its entire runtime.
Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil magnate who loves two things above all else: the power his family legacy affords him, and his ailing cat Maggie, whose health is failing in tandem with a catastrophe unfolding at one of his drilling platforms. A massive ice shelf has broken off a Greenland glacier and is barreling toward Europe, threatening hundreds of thousands of lives, and Digger is forced to juggle a veterinary house call with a genuine planetary emergency. That he treats both crises with roughly the same mixture of cockiness and self-interested political spin is the film’s opening joke, and for its first act, Digger plays almost entirely as theatrical satire – Dr. Strangelove by way of a Texas oil baron.
This is Cruise doing something he has not attempted in years, and it is worth sitting with how genuinely strange that is to watch. For the better part of a decade, Cruise has been cinema’s most reliable action star, a man famous for hanging off airplanes and being notoriously difficult to work with behind the camera. Here, buried under facial prosthetics and a fake belly, he delivers something closer to an acting masterclass than a stunt reel – including a ten-minute monologue that is, pound for pound, more impressive than anything he has done dangling from an aircraft. Digger is one of the more unlikable characters in Cruise’s entire filmography, and one can’t help but wonder if that exact quality is what made Cruise perfect for the role. You never root for Digger. You are, however, never less than invested in him, and that is a considerably harder trick to pull off.
Director Alejandro G. Inarritu surrounds his star with a supporting cast sharp enough to match him scene for scene. Riz Ahmed is superb as Ganesh, Digger’s increasingly exasperated and increasingly inebriated environmental scientist. Sandra Huller, playing Digger’s sister Emma, brings the same precise control that has made her one of the most reliably excellent actors working today. John Goodman and Michael Stuhlbarg, as the president and vice president respectively, generate real comic friction. Jesse Plemons and Sophie Wilde round out a film that treats its ensemble as a genuine ecosystem of power, vanity, and self-delusion rather than a collection of punchlines.
The film’s structure takes a hard swerve early on, built around a major narrative reveal that recontextualizes everything preceding it and deepens the film’s thematic ambitions considerably. The shift is genuinely jarring when it arrives, and it does not always land as gracefully as Inarritu clearly intends. But it succeeds more than it fails, and it leaves the audience with something more provocative to chew on walking out of the theater than the film’s early Strangelove-adjacent comedy initially promises.
This divisiveness, I suspect, is by design, and it will cost the film some of the audience goodwill a more straightforward satire might have earned. Viewers who come to Digger hoping for the rousing, crowd-pleasing Cruise of Top Gun or the Mission: Impossible franchise will likely find themselves alienated by a film actively uninterested in giving them that pleasure. Comparisons to Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up are not unearned, and like that film, Digger risks being remembered more for its ambition and its divisiveness than for the precision of its execution. Inarritu’s instinct toward the theatrical and the archetypal – Digger, Compson, and the rest functioning as broad reflections of real power players in our own world – produces a film whose semi-villainy is simultaneously amusing and genuinely depressing, which is precisely the tonal tightrope this kind of satire has to walk.
I cannot call Digger a great film, but I can certainly call it an ambitious one, propelled by a lead performance that reminds you Cruise remains capable of transformative, unglamorous character work when he chooses to pursue it rather than another round of death-defying stunts. Inarritu gives the film real heart beneath its satirical bite, and there is something genuinely moving about watching his star go all in on a character this unflattering and this fully inhabited.
The film’s message – about the specific, catastrophic folly of men who cannot distinguish personal legacy from planetary survival – is not subtle, and it does not need to be. We are, after all, still living through exactly the crisis this film is satirizing, which means the message bears repeating as many times and in as many forms as filmmakers are willing to deliver it, however imperfectly, until it actually lands with the force it deserves.