Tom Cruise's 'Digger' Dubbed Iñárritu's Most Disappointing — SkimNews
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- "Digger" is called Alejandro González Iñárritu's most disappointing film — "exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory" — by The Guardian's reviewer
- Tom Cruise stars as "Digger" Rockwell, an ageing, paunchy Texan oil tycoon, using prostheses, a wispy baldingness, and a Slim Pickens-inspired Stetson from Kubrick's Dr Strangelove
- Reckless Arctic drilling causes a Manhattan-sized ice floe to break away and head toward Norway, prompting a White House crisis meeting chaired by gaunt President Compson (John Goodman)
- Riz Ahmed plays cringingly polite chief scientist Ganesh, while Sandra Hüller and Michael Stuhlbarg are wasted in underdeveloped roles as half-sister and vice-president respectively
- Cruise's UN megaparliament scene has him lambasting world hypocrisy on oil dependency, though the reviewer notes his claim that renewables are "simply not viable" goes unchallenged
- The reviewer draws an unfavorable comparison to Adam McKay's "Don't Look Up" and flags a "big storytelling sideways lurch" that is "unearned and somehow anticlimactic"
Why it matters: Pairing Tom Cruise — still Hollywood's most bankable action star — with an Oscar-winning director on a mainstream climate satire was pitched as a serious swing at the era's defining issue; the Guardian's pan, joined by Variety's "bombastically self-important" verdict and IndieWire's "surreal misfire" tag, suggests the ambitious collision landed with a thud rather than a message.
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