Tom Cruise’s outlandish satire Digger is groundbreaking — and a bore

Review by

Russell Baillie

Arts & entertainment editor·New Zealand Listener·

1 Oct, 2026 05:00 PM3 mins to read

NZ Listener Arts & Entertainment Editor Russell Baillie has worked at the Listener since 2017 and was previously the editor of the NZ Herald’s TimeOut section.

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Tom Cruise and Riz Ahmed: Acting up a storm. Photo / Supplied

Digger, directed by Alejandro G Iñárritu, is in cinemas now.

When Alejandro González Iñárritu directed Leonardo DiCaprio to an acting Oscar in The Revenant, he memorably had Leo’s character crawl inside a horse corpse to keep warm. In this Iñárritu movie, it’s Tom Cruise’s turn to wrap himself in
a grim carcass – that of Digger Rockwell, Texan oil tycoon, and the most powerful man in the world.

Prosthetically transformed into a paunchy, grey old man with a good ol’ boy megaphone of a voice, he’s an impressively grotesque piece of work delivered with the sort of commitment you expect from Cruise. And, initially, it’s fascinating to see the 64-year-old, who spent eight Mission: Impossible movies peeling off latex masks, don one that’s a bit Dorian Gray.

But by making Cruise’s Digger the unrelenting, irredeemable centre of a film around which Iñárritu has constructed meta-layers of cinematic tricksiness makes it a movie that is hard to enjoy or even admire. Its particular sense of the absurd extends to the cinematography, which can sometimes feel like a lesser Terry Gilliam film.

There is a narrative rug-pull that Iñárritu and his co-writers perform along the way that might explain the unsettling strangeness of how the movie is staged up until that point. But it just adds to the bleakness of a story that references our looming climate disaster, and current American political ineptitude when it comes to dealing with it.

Fittingly perhaps, it’s Cruise’s least fun movie since Eyes Wide Shut, the swansong of the late Stanley Kubrick. It’s Kubrick’s classic Cold War black comedy Dr Strangelove that is a major influence here, especially in the figure of John Goodman’s US president, and Robert John Burke’s hawkish US general, among other echoes that get even louder towards the finale.

That film had Peter Sellers in multiple funny roles. This one has Cruise as Rockwell and also another character (which, to avoid spoilers, we won’t reveal). And while Cruise has some major moments of scenery-chewing speechifying, there are not a lot of laughs to be had.

The main story kicks off when Rockwell hears his Greenland drilling rig has cracked a glacier and unleashed subterranean methane, sending a giant iceberg named Judy towards Scandinavia, where it will cause a devastating tsunami.

The unstable and ashen-faced President Gompson – who’s dying of cancer and has some unhinged thoughts on whether the world should go on without him – and his coterie gather at Digger’s mansion to plan a response.

They have the advice of Rockwell’s chief scientist Dr Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), but the summit is more an exercise in controlling the narrative and directing the blame elsewhere.

Ahmed is one of the few supporting actors to get much breathing space. Sandra Hüller plays Rockwell’s younger stepsister, a green-tech entrepreneur, but she gets about as much screen time as Maggie, his ailing and incontinent emotional-support moggy. Yes, Maggie’s white, as villain’s cats always are. Jesse Plemons – another character in the film’s spoiler zone – doesn’t get enough to do, either.

Cruise has long banked on his daredevil performances in films that have been paeans to internal combustion (next up, a Days of Thunder sequel). Here, he’s taken more of a risk in a film that doesn’t require him to dangle off aeroplanes but just act up a storm. He certainly does that, but while Cruise’s performance as Digger might break new ground for the star, the film itself is a bore.

Rating out of five: ★★½

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