‘Digger’ Gives Tom Cruise A Belief System Even Crazier Than Scientology

Part of Tom Cruise’s contemporary appeal has been, in old-school movie-star fashion, his distance from the dirge of hot topics trending in the news. In catastrophe or calm, we could rely on him to blow up terrorist bunkers, hang off airplanes, and save civilization without lecturing us about it. “Top Gun: Maverick” flew closer to politics, but even that was patriotic escapist fantasy. Cruise’s latest role, as the eccentric oil tycoon at the center of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” brings these worlds into head-on collision.

“Digger” is an environmentalist screed dressed as a pastiche of Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” the great Cold War satire of nuclear brinkmanship and mutually assured destruction. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a larger-than-life Texas oil baron who trots around his stately home in silk pajamas and cowboy boots, obsesses over his gaunt and withering cat, and bellows questions at subordinates who stutter back like stunned imbeciles. His Southern twang is so heavy that Daniel Craig in “Knives Out” begins to sound understated.

When one of Rockwell’s Greenland drilling sites, following a spate of ignored warnings, destabilizes a colossal ice shelf that breaks free and heads toward Europe, the film erupts into environmental apocalypse on the scale of an Al Gore fever dream. Riz Ahmed is excellent as Ganesh, Digger’s tree-hugging scientist, whose vintage-inspired suits and nervous mannerisms make him feel transported from a Wes Anderson set. But this is Cruise’s show. If you enjoyed his gloriously repellent Les Grossman in “Tropic Thunder,” there is considerable pleasure in watching him commit to the bit.

For its first act, “Digger” works surprisingly well. The performances are spirited, the pacing taut, and Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera — often peering upward from bizarrely low angles — gives the absurdity a wonderfully warped grandeur. Then the film begins accumulating ideas, detours, and stylistic conceits faster than Iñárritu can organize them. What begins as a briskly staged catastrophe comedy gradually drifts into something more ponderous and self-conscious, and much of the comic momentum simply evaporates.

The overarching failure of “Digger” is that Iñárritu takes his subject too seriously for the satire to land. He is far too talented a filmmaker to misunderstand “Strangelove,” but his political obsessions keep narrowing the joke. Kubrick subjected everyone to ridicule: generals, Soviets, scientists, Red Scare hysterics, and the strategic minds who had rationalized mankind to the brink of annihilation. “Digger” only knows whom it wants you to despise. It is like making Luigi Mangione the protagonist of a movie about health insurance and expecting the satire to remain even-handed.

A genuinely Strangelovian climate comedy might have turned the hysteria itself into part of the target: some rogue eco-billionaire blocks out the sun with geoengineering, world leaders retreat to a crisis bunker, and everyone accidentally triggers a permafrost doomsday loop while arguing over carbon offsets. Iñárritu instead gives us villainous capitalists, buffoonish Republican-coded politicians, and environmental prophets whose warnings are vindicated almost wholesale.

There is another important difference. “Dr. Strangelove” confronted the spectre of nuclear annihilation without becoming hopeless. Its cynicism was rooted in the absurdity of mankind possessing the means to destroy itself and then entrusting those means to vain generals and bureaucrats. Beneath the black comedy was still an appeal to sanity. “Digger’s” environmental apocalypse feels foreordained (“that ship has sailed,” Ganesh tells us, before disappearing into a bottle of whisky to drown the portent). Its warnings have already been ignored, and its calamities are irreversible. It is a remarkably joyless worldview for a supposed comedy.

The Kubrick parallels are nevertheless amusing. Following news of the ice shelf, President Compson, played with irate gusto by John Goodman, gathers his generals to discuss how best to “bomb the sh*t out of it,” in a sequence practically begging someone to shout, “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” The jokes quickly grow less nimble. The men conclude one meeting gathered around a Bible, offering a parody prayer about the perils of secularism; Goodman gleefully lauds the absence of women in the room; dialogue screeches about the forest fires and hurricanes we have caused by exiting the Paris climate agreement. (The only thing missing was Greta Thunberg rappelling into the scene to scream at the audience herself.) The satire is gradually wrenched dry and sacrificed to such tedious sermonizing.

The film’s best scene comes when Rockwell addresses a kind of United Nations tribunal. His hubris reaches operatic proportions as he leaps atop desks and accepts blame for seemingly every calamity on Earth before turning the accusation back on his audience. “Why don’t we just stop drilling altogether? You don’t want me to!” he thunders. “Deep down inside you want me to keep pounding! Oil is what we have! Oil is what God gave us! Oil is the mother’s milk of Earth!”

Here, briefly, “Digger” becomes more interesting than its politics. Rockwell’s defense is meant to be repellent, but it contains the uncomfortable truth that fossil-fuel consumption does not begin and end with cartoonish oil barons. The people condemning him still fly, drive, heat homes, consume plastics, and inhabit economies built around the stuff he extracts. Had Iñárritu trusted that contradiction, he might have had a sharper movie.

Instead, sanctimony keeps swallowing the comedy. There is nothing more insufferable than someone convinced he is saving the world, and “Digger” spends two hours indulging precisely that conviction.

I have long considered Iñárritu among Hollywood’s more overrated filmmakers, an Academy darling with a weakness for mistaking wanton self-indulgence for profundity. His plodding “The Revenant” finally won Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar; perhaps this sanctimonious screed can do the same for Cruise. Lord knows he has earned one.

“Digger” piles political satire, environmental apocalypse, visual gimmickry, and assorted philosophical detours atop a premise that Cruise’s cavalier performance can only carry so far. With more discipline, it might have been a serviceable comedy in the vein of “Don’t Look Up.” Instead, like its giant block of ice christened Judy, it spends much of its running time lethargically floating toward an inevitable collision. Tom Cruise has finally found a belief system even crazier than Scientology.

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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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