In Digger, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu gives Tom Cruise a wealthy oil tycoon to play with, and Cruise responds by unleashing nearly every mannerism in his arsenal. The result has flashes of inspired absurdity, but the film’s environmental satire and sprawling excess don’t always come together, leaving this unlikely collaboration more intriguing than fully satisfying.
Tom Cruise’s youthful appearance has vanished under thick facial prosthetics.
Pot-bellied, shirtless and proudly displaying his ass crack as he wanders around his mansion, he resembles a stripped-down villain from an old James Bond film.
A white, ailing cat rests on his shoulder, its puppet-like appearance recalling something Guillermo Del Toro might have created.
Yet what initially stands out in this early scene in Digger is the deliberate attention paid to the suffering of the dying animal.
Where fellow Mexican director Del Toro treats living creatures with deep respect, Alejandro G. Inarritu seems to belong to a different breed.
In Amores Perros, Inarritu’s debut feature, dogs are subjected to distress in intense dogfighting scenes staged for the sake of art. The film nearly faced a ban in the U.K. before its 2000 premiere.
When it comes to humans, however, Inarritu’s methods have also proved punishing. The shoot for The Revenant was reportedly so grueling, amid subzero temperatures, that crew members described it as a living hell. Ten people quit or were fired during filming.
Cruise, meanwhile, is no lightweight when it comes to conflict. The two men, both now in their mid-sixties, may have found a connection beyond the “landscapes over landscapes over landscapes” that Inarritu saw in Cruise’s eyes, as he described in an interview with GQ.
Cruise plays a wealthy Texan oil tycoon Digger Rockwell who cares more about money than the city-sized glacier fractured by his drilling operation, as it sails away toward the coast of Norway.
He finds a way “to spin this.” In the film’s best scene, he convinces an angry crowd that they need oil no matter what.
There’s also a major layered twist in the plot, which yours truly will leave unrevealed here.
The previously mentioned scene brings together nearly every Cruise mannerism from a film career spanning more than four decades, from Risky Business and Jerry Maguire to Tropic Thunder.
In the latter, Cruise appeared in prosthetics for the first time, wearing a fat suit and silicone bald cap as a film executive whose character isn’t far removed from the oil magnate Rockwell.
In Digger, another notable performance comes from John Goodman (The Big Lebowski), who plays the U.S. president as an erratic, short-tempered man with a feverish stare.
The funniest character, though, is portrayed by Riz Ahmed (Bait) as Ganesh, a government scientist and the film’s moral compass, a largely ignored character with impeccable comic timing.
Digger has more jokes and plot than Biutiful or The Revenant, along with plenty of Cruise’s manic charm, yet its environmental satire rarely digs deeper than its broadest targets.
For Cruise, Inarritu became more than a blip on the radar after he saw Amores Perros over 25 years ago. In the GQ interview, he recalled watching Inarritu frame carefully composed shots while appearing to film handheld.
“The impact and the power was just like a hammer,” Cruise said.
At last, Cruise has found his Inarritu and Inarritu his Cruise.
‘Digger’ opens in cinemas on October 2.
FILM DETAILS
Title: Digger
Distributor: Warner Bros. Finland Oy
Production year: 2026
Running time: 129 minutes
Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons
Director: Alejandro G. Inarritu
Producer: Alejandro Inarritu, Mary Parent ja Tom Cruise
Composer: Cosmo Sheldrake
Director of photography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Screenwriter: Alejandro Inarritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone ja Sabina Berman
