'Digger' Review: Tom Cruise Drives An Exhilarating, Exhausting Tragicomedy

LOS ANGELES, CA — Narrative collides with reality, self-interest masquerades as responsibility, and a billionaire oil baron confronts the consequences of his own mythology in Alejandro G. Iñárritu's "Digger." Beneath the film's climate-disaster satire lies a story where inconvenient truths steadily intrude upon the fictions people construct around power, greed and accountability.

Grandiosity has long been central to Iñárritu's cinema. Whether navigating the backstage chaos of "Birdman," the elemental hardships of "The Revenant" or the existential labyrinth of "Bardo," the director rarely approaches his subjects by halves. "Digger" carries that sensibility forward, coupling spectacle with an ongoing fascination for performance and self-invention on a scale that is equal parts exhilarating and exhausting.

Subscribe

Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) awakens in a lavish estate adorned with taxidermy, antlers and polar-bear rugs, accompanied by a beloved cat whose conspicuous artificial presence immediately unsettles the illusion of realism. Outside, the landscape resembles a Norman Rockwell tableau preserved behind museum glass, less a living environment than a carefully curated image of one. Long before the film's central catastrophe arrives, Iñárritu establishes a world where spectacle and artifice seem inseparable from reality.

That illusion begins to fracture with a crack in the Arctic ice and an escalating methane leak that raises alarm among scientists. Digger responds not with concern but assurance, brushing aside warnings with homespun confidence and baseball metaphors while casting himself as the indispensable architect of the solution.

Comparisons to "Dr. Strangelove" are inevitable. Like Kubrick's Cold War satire, "Digger" approaches catastrophe through exaggeration and absurdity, populating its world with figures who speak past reality even as it closes in around them. Yet Iñárritu's interests ultimately lie elsewhere. Rather than functioning solely as satire, the film settles into something closer to a tragicomedy, using catastrophe less as a target than as a catalyst for exposing the myths through which individuals justify power, evade responsibility and preserve their sense of self. The comic register proves uneven, however. While some of the film's broadest gags find their mark, many are less funny than they are provocative.

Cruise emerges as an inspired vessel for that tension. Beneath layers of prosthetics, a thinning head of white hair and a swaggering Southern drawl, he transforms Digger into a grotesque caricature of wealth, ego and certainty. The performance recalls the broad absurdity of Les Grossman in "Tropic Thunder," yet it serves a far more ambitious purpose here.

What makes Digger compelling is not the caricature itself but the sincerity with which he inhabits it. Cruise delivers every line with the conviction of a man incapable of imagining a world that does not ultimately conform to his expectations. As reality intrudes, Digger is unable to divest a self-image he has spent a lifetime constructing.

Nowhere is this more evident than in a showstopping public address where Digger mounts a full-throated defense of the industry that made him powerful. The argument is steeped in self-interest yet derives its force from an uncomfortable truth: the prosperity enjoyed by his accusers remains entangled with the world he helped build. The scene is often hilarious and occasionally infuriating. It's most effective when it blurs the line between indictment and persuasion, shifting the question from who bears responsibility to who gets to define it.

The supporting cast is equally effective. Riz Ahmed brings mounting urgency to Ganesh, the scientist tasked with confronting Digger with inconvenient facts. Sandra Hüller is particularly memorable as Digger's half-sister, whose volatile unpredictability repeatedly punctures the confidence and control on which his authority depends. John Goodman rounds out the ensemble as President Compson, another figure whose confidence exceeds his grasp on reality.

Working alongside cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu reinforces the film's fascination with performance and self-invention through a visual language of artifice and grandiosity. Shot in VistaVision, the film frames its characters as larger-than-life figures suspended between self-mythology and reality. Cosmo Sheldrake's score, meanwhile, mirrors that instability, veering from absurdity to tension to melancholy with disarming ease. The result is a world where fact often feels less persuasive than fiction.

"Digger's" greatest strength proves to be its greatest liability. Its fascination with performance, image and self-creation often pushes it toward a level of ambition that can feel exhausting, occasionally buckling under the weight of its own competing ideas. That tension is especially evident in the film's black-comic impulses, which frequently prove more intellectually provocative than genuinely funny. Yet that unwieldiness often feels woven into the film's design. The result is frequently messy and occasionally maddening, but rarely uninteresting.

Ultimately, "Digger" is less interested in assigning blame than interrogating the fictions people construct to avoid it. Competing narratives accumulate, collide and unravel, exposing the limits of each. Reality remains stubbornly indifferent to the stories built to domesticate it.