Movie Review: Digger

4.5 stars out of 5

Tom Cruise’s new movie Digger: It’s a huge flop! It’s terrible! It makes no sense! We’re an increasingly impatient, decreasingly bright audience!

See this movie. You might have to wait till it’s streaming. But this isn’t a situation like Coppola’s Megalopolis that was so out there that it was maybe secretly genius. Digger is actually easy to follow and fun and increasingly rewarding as you sit there.

Which is why I’m not going to tell you much plot. The pleasure of this movie is watching it unfold and repeatedly surprise you/delight me.

Kudos to Tom Cruise. He’s been making the same movie for 25 years now. They are more often than not very entertaining and more often than not very profitable. But he hasn’t exactly been challenging himself. In this movie, however, Tom Cruise chooses to act and it turns out he’s still quite good. Oscar nomination worthy? I think so!

We are presented with Cruise as Digger Rockwell, old-school Texan oil baron. Cruise walks, talks, and — as you likely have seen — looks different. He embodies the character and sometimes a little Cruise slips out and that’s fun too. He’s surrounded by a top-quality cast: Riz Ahmed (who I loved in The Night Of) plays a climate scientist, John Goodman is a blustery U.S. president, the great Michael Stuhlbarg his feckless VP, Sandra Hüller (Project Hail Mary, Anatomy of a Fall) is Digger’s sort-of-idealistic sis, Jesse Plemons is… well we don’t know but he’s having wide-eyed fun.

The director/co-writer is Alejandro G. Iñárritu and over time I’ve appreciated his work more and more (21 Grams, Birdman, The Revenant, and… wow, he hasn’t directed a movie in 10 years?? And you’re all, “Meh, I don’t like Cruise in a mask anymore, pass.” Sit down and watch this movie!

This is a climate-change disaster flick, a dark comedy, a sharp satire of corporate greed and global politics, a personal drama. I don’t know what Iñárritu has been up to the past decade but he’s been watching us and does not like what he’s seen. He lets it all hang out on Digger, and with a fully engaged Cruise in his corner, it’s a triumph.