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Rated PG – 2hr 7min
Satire / Black Comedy

Digger. Many reviewers hate it. You might love it. The Digger reviews do not hold back. The positive reviews contain strong superlatives praising Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s bold new film starring Tom Cruise, and the negative reviews are utterly scathing. Is Digger a 5-out-of-5 “audacious, risky, terrific fun” — like The London Evening Standard says? Or is Digger an 0-out-of-4, “the worst movie of Tom Cruise’s career” — as The Boston Globe says? Right out of the gate on Rotten Tomatoes, the Warner Bros. film is hovering around a dead even 50 percent split.

In Digger, a nearly unrecognizable Tom Cruise plays an oblivious oil tycoon whose drilling in Greenland dislodges an ice shelf from a glacier that’s going to cause a global disaster. He must race to prove that he’s humanity’s savior before the ecological accident wreaks havoc on the planet. The film also stars Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons.

Tom Cruise does things that seem terrifying to the rest of us, whether it’s clinging to the sides of planes or riding motorbikes off the tops of cliffs. But his new film is the biggest risk of his career. He isn’t in danger of breaking any bones, for a change, but he is in danger of being called pretentious and self-indulgent – as well as being associated with what could well be a humungous flop.

The story about a self-obsessed, self-mythologizing opportunist pillaging a dying planet for his own profits unravels into something stranger, more confusing, more barbed and angry and ultimately defeatist. Digger is a comedy in the way one could find their own funeral funny. Explaining exactly why would probably be a mistake (though we can confirm this is unequivocally not a musical). Without quite getting close to M. Night Shyamalan territory, going in blind to Digger’s actual format is probably for the best. (For example, revealing how Jesse Plemons’s red-haired Svengali fits into all this would probably spoil the fun.) Because the befuddling delight in discovering exactly how Iñárritu has chosen to make his demoralizing point about where we’re all headed is one of the movie’s few uplifting spots.

Most people won’t go to see it – and some people who do will walk out halfway through. But that doesn’t mean that Digger is a failure. It’s just that it’s a bizarre, hectoring, conceptually challenging eco-satire, so it’s not likely to be mistaken for Mission: Impossible.

Judged purely a satire, then, Digger is powerfully resonant. But there is more to it than that. The film has two high-concept twists which raise new questions about everything you’ve seen so far. I won’t reveal any more. All I’ll say is that the first full-length trailer looked so exaggerated and artificial that some people wondered if Iñárritu had actually made a musical. The truth is even more surprising.

If this art-house extravaganza had featured an actor known for left-field indie films, it would have been lauded as a daring experiment. But as it features the actor at the very top of Hollywood’s A-list, many viewers will wonder what he was thinking.

But you have to hand it to Cruise. When he’s making an action blockbuster, he wants it to showcase the most outrageous stunts ever seen. And when he’s making an oddball apocalyptic tragicomedy, he goes for it with the same limitless, daredevil ambition.