Judging from the trailers for Digger, I knew I was walking into something strange. What I didn’t know was exactly what flavor of strange Tom Cruise and director Alejandro González Iñárritu were about to serve up.
Turns out, it’s a whole buffet of insanity. This movie is weird, theatrical, funny, uncomfortable, occasionally confusing, and completely committed to doing its own thing. I had issues with it, and I can already tell that a lot of people are going to absolutely hate it, but I kind of loved how aggressively odd it gets.
This isn’t Cruise running from explosions or hanging off the side of an airplane. This is Cruise throwing himself headfirst into one of the strangest and most interesting performances of his career, and I had a blast watching him go completely nuts.
Cruise plays eccentric oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, a powerful, deeply flawed man dealing with two very different disasters at the same time. His beloved cat Maggie is dying, while a catastrophe involving one of his drilling platforms in Greenland has sent a massive chunk of ice toward Europe.
Yes, those two problems somehow coexist in the same movie. That should give you some idea of what you’re dealing with here. Digger is surrounded by environmental scientist Ganesh, played by Riz Ahmed, his sister Emma, played by Sandra Hüller, and President Compson, played by John Goodman, along with Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, and Sophie Wilde.
Everybody is operating at a wildly heightened level, and Cruise is leading the charge with facial prosthetics, a belly, a huge Texas accent, and enough eccentric energy to power a small city.
For roughly the first 20 minutes, I thought I understood what Digger was doing. I was wrong. The movie eventually pulls the rug out from under you and suddenly you’re sitting there thinking, “Wait… what the hell am I watching now?”
The entire structure changes, and for a while I was confused about where Iñárritu was taking me. Instead of immediately explaining itself, the movie asks you to hang on and ride through the madness.
Information arrives piece by piece. Layers start getting peeled away. Things that initially seem ridiculous begin making more sense, and by the time the movie reaches the end, you finally have a much clearer picture of what this bizarre thing has been doing the whole time.
I really appreciated that. Digger plays games with its own reality, and part of the fun is figuring out the rules while the movie is already sprinting down the road without you.
That heightened craziness also explains the performances, because holy crap, everybody is cranked up. At first, I wondered why everything felt so exaggerated. Cruise in particular is operating somewhere around a 17 on a scale that only goes to 10.
Then the movie starts revealing why everything feels the way it does, and suddenly those choices become much more interesting. Cruise completely disappears into Digger Rockwell, and I’ve never seen him give a performance quite like this.
There are flashes of the lunatic energy he brought to Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, but this is something entirely different. He’s funny, obnoxious, charismatic, ridiculous, vulnerable, and occasionally kind of heartbreaking.
There’s even a lengthy monologue that gives Cruise a chance to remind everyone that underneath all the blockbuster spectacle, the guy is still one hell of an actor.
Ahmed is also fantastic as the increasingly frustrated Ganesh, while Hüller, Goodman, Stuhlbarg, Plemons, and Wilde all get opportunities to show off their skills and go all out in this wonderfully bizarre sandbox.
What really worked for me is that all the insanity actually has something underneath it. Digger is playing around with power, wealth, legacy, environmental catastrophe, ego, responsibility, politics, and the ridiculous ways powerful people convince themselves they’re saving everyone while protecting their own interests.
Some of it has a wonderfully absurd Dr. Strangelove flavor, especially when Digger and the people surrounding him start treating potentially catastrophic events with a mixture of panic, arrogance, incompetence, and political theater.
The movie can be very funny, but there’s something pretty grim sitting underneath those laughs. Iñárritu doesn’t land every idea he throws at the screen, and sometimes the movie feels like it has six different thoughts fighting for control of the steering wheel, but I’d rather watch something this weird and ambitious swing like a maniac than something completely predictable.
And yeah, people are going to hate this movie. I already heard people walking out of my screening calling it one of the worst movies they’d ever seen, which honestly made me laugh because I completely understand how someone gets there.
Digger isn’t remotely interested in behaving like a normal Tom Cruise movie, or even a normal movie in general. If you take all of its theatrical weirdness purely at face value, there’s a good chance this thing is going to drive you up the wall.
You have to roll with it, let it reveal itself, and eventually look at what it’s trying to say underneath all the exaggerated performances and absurdity. Even then, it still might not work for you. This is definitely a very specific flavor, and some people are going to take one bite and immediately spit it across the room.
Me? I enjoyed it. Digger has problems, it gets messy, and its ambitions occasionally outrun its ability to pull everything together, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward. More importantly, I loved seeing Cruise take this kind of gigantic creative swing.
If you watched the trailers and thought, “This looks completely insane and I need to see what the hell Tom Cruise is doing,” then absolutely check it out. If the trailers already annoyed you, I can confidently say the actual movie isn’t going to suddenly become something you like.
It gets weirder. Much weirder. Digger is chaotic, funny, theatrical, ambitious, divisive, and powered by a Tom Cruise performance that goes screaming into territory I didn’t expect from him. It’s not going to be everybody’s thing, but for me, watching Cruise and the rest of the cast completely cut loose in this wonderfully deranged experiment was worth the ride.
