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Tom Cruise and Riz Ahmed: Acting up a storm. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n
Digger, directed by Alejandro G I\u00f1\u00e1rritu, is in cinemas now.<\/p>\n
\n When Alejandro Gonz\u00e1lez I\u00f1\u00e1rritu directed Leonardo DiCaprio to an acting Oscar in The Revenant, he memorably had Leo\u2019s character crawl inside a horse corpse to keep warm. In this I\u00f1\u00e1rritu movie, it\u2019s Tom Cruise\u2019s turn to wrap himself in
\n a grim carcass \u2013 that of Digger Rockwell, Texan oil tycoon, and the most powerful man in the world.\n <\/p>\n
Prosthetically transformed into a paunchy, grey old man with a good ol\u2019 boy megaphone of a voice, he\u2019s an impressively grotesque piece of work delivered with the sort of commitment you expect from Cruise. And, initially, it\u2019s fascinating to see the 64-year-old, who spent eight Mission: Impossible movies peeling off latex masks, don one that\u2019s a bit Dorian Gray.<\/p>\n
But by making Cruise\u2019s Digger the unrelenting, irredeemable centre of a film around which I\u00f1\u00e1rritu 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.<\/p>\n
There is a narrative rug-pull that I\u00f1\u00e1rritu 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.<\/p>\n
Fittingly perhaps, it\u2019s Cruise\u2019s least fun movie since Eyes Wide Shut, the swansong of the late Stanley Kubrick. It\u2019s Kubrick\u2019s classic Cold War black comedy Dr Strangelove that is a major influence here, especially in the figure of John Goodman\u2019s US president, and Robert John Burke\u2019s hawkish US general, among other echoes that get even louder towards the finale.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t reveal). And while Cruise has some major moments of scenery-chewing speechifying, there are not a lot of laughs to be had.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The unstable and ashen-faced President Gompson \u2013 who\u2019s dying of cancer and has some unhinged thoughts on whether the world should go on without him \u2013 and his coterie gather at Digger\u2019s mansion to plan a response.<\/p>\n
They have the advice of Rockwell\u2019s chief scientist Dr Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), but the summit is more an exercise in controlling the narrative and directing the blame elsewhere.<\/p>\n
Ahmed is one of the few supporting actors to get much breathing space. Sandra H\u00fcller plays Rockwell\u2019s 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\u2019s white, as villain\u2019s cats always are. Jesse Plemons \u2013 another character in the film\u2019s spoiler zone \u2013 doesn\u2019t get enough to do, either.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s taken more of a risk in a film that doesn\u2019t require him to dangle off aeroplanes but just act up a storm. He certainly does that, but while Cruise\u2019s performance as Digger might break new ground for the star, the film itself is a bore. <\/p>\n
Rating out of five: \u2605\u2605\u00bd<\/p>\n
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Copy LinkEmailFacebookTwitter\/XLinkedInReddit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Review by Russell Baillie Arts & entertainment editor\u00b7New Zealand Listener\u00b7 1 Oct, 2026 05:00 PM3 mins to read…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618663,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[304642,95,111318,13182,42153,6374,37637,156,26661,304643,185,111,139,425,69,36094,3349,5134],"class_list":["post-618662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-alejandro","tag-and","tag-bore","tag-cinemas","tag-cruises","tag-digger","tag-directed","tag-entertainment","tag-groundbreaking","tag-irritu","tag-is","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-now","tag-nz","tag-outlandish","tag-satire","tag-tom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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