‘Digger’ movie review: Alejandro G. Iñárritu or: How Tom Cruise Learned to Stop Running and Love the Bit

You can’t handle the truth to Iñárritu’s spectacularly self-conscious apocalypse — a maximalist fever dream and grandiose Russian doll of cinematic self-indulgence, with Tom Cruise trapped inside the joke

Published - October 02, 2026 04:27 pm IST

A still from ‘Digger’ | Photo Credit: Warner Bros.

…is what I periodically muttered to myself as I sat gobsmacked, trying to reverse-engineer what the hell Alejandro González Iñárritu thought he was doing with this postmodernist fever dream of a movie— a $125-million climate-catastrophe clown car starring none other than Hollywood’s most indestructible human, in what has already been anointed by the surrounding discourse as the defining feat of his latter-career resurrection tour. By now, the divisiveness surrounding Digger has become almost as baroque as the film itself, partly because of some baffling narrative choices and partly because of Iñárritu’s unchecked self-indulgence. Yet, as the film progressed, my initial “I don’t get what he’s trying to do here” gradually mutated into “I don’t get why everyone seems to hate this thing so much.”

The film opens the titular Digger Rockwell, a Texas oil billionaire whose mansion is an obscene catalogue of wealth and a comprehensive inventory of his appetites, including taxidermied animals, heavy weaponry, and enough conspicuous old-money ornamentation to justify his very obvious entitlement. Digger has made his fortune by taking things out of the ground, but the one natural resource he is currently unwilling to surrender is Maggie, his thirty-year-old, bedraggled, incontinent cat, whose veterinarian estimates that she has anywhere between a few minutes and a couple of weeks left. Then an explosion at one of Digger’s drilling facilities in Greenland tears through the Arctic ice shelf, kills the workers at the site and dislodges a colossal section of ice that begins drifting towards Europe, while the resulting methane release threatens to turn things into a civilisation-scale catastrophe.

Digger’s response naturally, is not immediate accountability but an emergency gathering of people whose first instinct is to determine who can be blamed and what can be concealed. The American President, played by John Goodman as a deteriorating political grotesque, arrives with Vice-President Michael Stuhlbarg and an assortment of bootlicking officials, while Riz Ahmed’s environmental scientist, Nirav Ganesh desperately attempts to explain the scope of the imminent apocalypse. Sandra Hüller plays Digger’s sister and business partner, while Emma D’Arcy stars as Digger’s level-headed assistant Lina.

But before we go any further, I honestly don’t think there is any point attempting a meaningful critique of this movie without discussing its big reveal, so consider this your SPOILER WARNING.

Digger is deliberately drawn as a human Foghorn Leghorn, with a generous helping of Les Grossman’s vulgarity, and Cruise attacks the part with the exact kind of shamelessness that made the latter one of his great comic performances. There isn’t a trace of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, Ethan Hunt or Jerry Maguire here. Cruise is completely buried inside the prosthetics, the pot belly, the thinning hair, the drawl and that permanently irritated physicality, making this his most engulfing performance since A Few Good Men and Eyes Wide Shut. Digger is a disgusting oaf, but Cruise never plays him as merely stupid; there is always the conviction of a man who genuinely believes his own greed is a public service. The best showcase of that inflated conviction comes during the standout ten-minute confrontation with the European leaders. Digger’s monologue turns the room against itself, arguing that everyone condemning him still depends on the oil he supplies (someone even flings a shoe at him à la George Bush in Iraq); and Cruise rips through the scene with such physical and vocal force. The performance is enormous, but it doesn’t feel vain. Cruise has completely surrendered to the satire.

A still from ‘Digger’ | Photo Credit: Warner Bros.

There are plenty of recognisable faces orbiting Cruise, and most of them do perfectly serviceable work. Goodman, in particular, gives what may be the most convincing on-screen performance of a geriatric President with rectal cancer (that somehow isn’t a biopic?). But the only actor who consistently manages to stand his ground and occasionally even outshining the behemoth that is Cruise, is Riz Ahmed. Ahmed plays the film’s reluctant voice of reason with a wonderfully understated combination of sheepishness, exasperation and barely contained disbelief. Ganesh is surrounded by people with vastly more money and power than him, but he is also the only person who seems to have retained a functioning spine, which makes his increasingly futile attempts to get Digger to confront reality considerably funnier than any of the broader political caricatures around him. The role was reportedly intended for our own Fahadh Faasil before he dropped out, and all credit to Fahadh, but I genuinely struggle to imagine anyone making Ganesh this convincing. Every time the two share a scene, Ahmed ends up stealing scenes from Cruise without ever appearing to compete for them.