Review: in 'Digger', Tom Cruise has a blast as an apocalyptic billionaire — too bad Iñárritu's satire laughs alone

This is an opinion piece. 'Digger', which hits US and UK theaters this Friday (Oct. 2), casts Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon racing to prove he is humanity's savior before the environmental disaster he unleashed destroys everything. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, of 'Birdman' and 'The Revenant', directs a cast that also includes Riz Ahmed, John Goodman as the US president, Sandra Hüller and Jesse Plemons across 129 minutes of sprawling satire.

The film's best asset sits at its center: Cruise drops the action-hero persona and embraces a vain, ridiculous and frightening character in one of the loosest performances of his career. Iñárritu's camerawork and staging are inventive and appropriately loud, and even critics who disliked the whole acknowledged the strength of the lead and the visuals — the BBC, for one, liked it while finding some of its excesses a bit too excessive.

The trouble is that the satire seems more interested in admiring itself than in biting. Much of the US press, from IndieWire and TheWrap to the Los Angeles Times, described a detached, self-satisfied film that feels hollow once the lights come up. The scores confirm the split: 53% on Rotten Tomatoes and 44 on Metacritic, Cruise's worst Tomatometer since 'The Mummy' (2017). Warner Bros. even leaned into the controversy with an ad pairing raves and pans side by side.

In the end, 'Digger' is one of those fascinating misfires worth arguing about: ambitious, uneven and too long, held up by a star willing to laugh at his own image. It is neither the masterpiece some see nor the disaster the box office suggests — it is a film that shouts loudly and says little.

Score: 5/10