Tom Cruise has spent most of his career staying above the fray of trending political causes, blowing up bunkers and dangling from aircraft while the culture wars raged elsewhere. According to a review in The Daily Wire, his latest project throws that distance out the window — and the result is a mess.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger” casts Cruise as Digger Rockwell, a larger-than-life Texas oil baron who stomps around his estate in silk pajamas and cowboy boots, frets over a sickly cat, and barks questions at stammering subordinates. Film critic Harry Khachatrian, writing for the Washington Examiner and republished as part of The Daily Wire’s Upstream culture section, describes the performance as a full commitment to the bit — one that will delight anyone who enjoyed Cruise’s “gloriously repellent” Les Grossman in “Tropic Thunder.”
The plot kicks into gear when one of Rockwell’s Greenland drilling sites, after a string of ignored warnings, destabilizes a massive ice shelf that breaks loose and drifts toward Europe. What follows, per the review, plays as “an environmentalist screed dressed as a pastiche” of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” — apocalypse staged on the scale of “an Al Gore fever dream.”
Riz Ahmed co-stars as Ganesh, a tree-hugging scientist whose vintage suits and nervous tics, in the reviewer’s estimation, feel airlifted from a Wes Anderson film. But the show belongs to Cruise, and for the first act, Khachatrian writes, the film works surprisingly well: spirited performances, taut pacing, and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s bizarrely low camera angles lending the absurdity “a wonderfully warped grandeur.”
A satire that picks sides
Then, according to the review, the wheels come off. The movie piles up ideas, detours, and stylistic flourishes faster than Iñárritu can organize them, and the comic momentum drains away into something ponderous and self-conscious.
The core problem, as Khachatrian frames it, is that the director takes his subject too seriously for the satire to land. Kubrick’s classic trained its fire on everyone — generals, Soviets, scientists, Red Scare hysterics, the strategists who rationalized annihilation. “Digger,” by contrast, “only knows whom it wants you to despise.” The reviewer likens it to casting Luigi Mangione as the hero of a health insurance movie and expecting the jokes to stay even-handed.
What a genuinely Strangelovian climate comedy might look like, he suggests, is a rogue eco-billionaire blotting out the sun with geoengineering while world leaders bicker over carbon offsets in a bunker and accidentally trigger a permafrost doomsday loop. Instead, the film offers villainous capitalists, buffoonish Republican-coded politicians, and environmental prophets whose warnings are vindicated almost entirely.
There is also a tonal gap. “Dr. Strangelove” stared down nuclear annihilation without surrendering to hopelessness, its cynicism grounded in the absurdity of handing world-ending weapons to vain bureaucrats. “Digger’s” apocalypse, the review argues, feels foreordained — Ganesh declares “that ship has sailed” before retreating into a bottle of whisky — making for “a remarkably joyless worldview for a supposed comedy.”
Goodman’s president and the film’s best scene
John Goodman turns up as President Compson, who convenes his generals to figure out how to “bomb the sh*t out of it” — a sequence the reviewer says practically begs for someone to shout the famous War Room line. The jokes get less nimble from there: one meeting ends with the men gathered around a Bible for a parody prayer about secularism; Goodman’s character cheerfully notes the absence of women; dialogue screeches about the hurricanes and wildfires caused by exiting the Paris climate agreement. Khachatrian’s verdict: the satire is “wrenched dry” in service of tedious sermonizing, with the only missing ingredient being Greta Thunberg rappelling in to yell at the audience herself.
The film’s strongest moment, in his telling, comes when Rockwell faces something like a United Nations tribunal. His hubris goes operatic as he vaults onto desks and accepts blame for nearly every calamity on Earth before flinging the accusation back at his accusers. “Why don’t we just stop drilling altogether? You don’t want me to!” he thunders. “Deep down inside you want me to keep pounding! Oil is what we have! Oil is what God gave us! Oil is the mother’s milk of Earth!”
Briefly, the review concedes, the movie becomes more interesting than its politics. Rockwell’s rant is meant to repel, but it carries an uncomfortable truth: fossil-fuel consumption does not begin and end with cartoonish oil barons. The people condemning him still fly, drive, heat their homes, buy plastics, and live inside economies built on what he extracts. Had Iñárritu trusted that contradiction, Khachatrian writes, he might have had a sharper film.
Instead, sanctimony keeps swallowing the comedy — and there is, in the reviewer’s words, nothing more insufferable than someone convinced he is saving the world. He describes “Digger” as two hours indulging exactly that conviction.
A career note and a verdict
Khachatrian, who has long regarded Iñárritu as one of Hollywood’s more overrated filmmakers — an Academy darling prone to mistaking self-indulgence for profundity — notes that “The Revenant” finally won Leonardo DiCaprio his Oscar, and wonders whether this “sanctimonious screed” could do the same for Cruise. He adds that Cruise has earned one.
Stacked with political satire, environmental disaster, visual gimmickry, and philosophical detours, the film leans on Cruise’s cavalier performance further than it can bear, according to the review. With more discipline, it might have worked as a serviceable comedy in the vein of “Don’t Look Up.” As it stands, the reviewer concludes, it drifts toward its inevitable collision much like its giant block of ice — christened Judy — floats lethargically across the screen. And in his final line, he quips that Tom Cruise has finally found a belief system even crazier than Scientology.
The review was published as part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s culture and lifestyle vertical, and the author is identified as a film critic for the Washington Examiner.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/digger-gives-tom-cruise-a-belief-system-even-crazier-than-scientology