‘Digger’ Buries Tom Cruise in Overblown and Underwhelming Climate Change Satire

The world premiere of “Digger,” Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film starring Tom Cruise, was selected for this year’s Royal Film Performance in London’s West End, attended by the Prince and Princess of Wales. Yet in being an overblown, ostentatious, performative and preachily progressive hot mess, “Digger” felt to me like the cinematic equivalent of Prince William’s younger brother, Prince Harry.We are a few months away from the 30th anniversary of Cruise memorably saying, “You complete me,” in Cameron Crowe’s “Jerry Maguire.” With “Digger,” it is more a case of “You confuse me.” That is not chiefly Cruise’s fault. His performance as Digger Rockwell, an unscrupulous oil billionaire who triggers a monumental worldwide ecological catastrophe, is a valiant creative gamble — his first non-franchise role in nearly a decade.But the gamble has not paid off. It should be said I’m far from being a Tom Cruise hater. Indeed, I once wrote for the Sun why more respect should be given to the virtues of his much-maligned 1988 film “Cocktail.” The culprit here is Iñárritu, who has built a career on subverting perceptions of Hollywood leading men, with Michael Keaton in “Birdman” and Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant.” Here, he unsuccessfully attempts to recast Cruise as a bombastic global antihero, burying him beneath prosthetics until, by the end, Digger Rockwell bears a resemblance to Doc Emmett Brown in “Back to the Future”.“Digger” begins unpromisingly, with the titular character reckoning with the destructive actions of his oil company, against the backdrop of hysterical agitprop, summoning the likes of his firm’s chief scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) and American President Compson (John Goodman). A significant twist happens half an hour into the film, but rather than rebooting this cartoonish folly into more sophisticated territory, the tiresome, heightened histrionics soon resume. Among this climate change satire’s many problems is that the screenwriters Mr. Iñárritu, Alexander Dinelaris, Sabina Berman, and Nicolas Giacobone appear to have written three separate films, none of them successful. One is a tale about environmental catastrophe; one is a family drama; and the third is a meta-arthouse meditation, of the type that Mr. Cruise’s ex-wife Nicole Kidman has made on occasion over the years.The problem with this climate change satire is that its arguments will be overly familiar to anyone in possession of a television or with access to the internet. The script, in featuring Mr. Cruise utter lines such as “I don’t give a f–k about polar bears any more than they give a f–k about me,” is no better than the spiel you get from an environmental activist, say from Greenpeace USA, who stops you in the street to ask for money.The internet got wildly excited with rumors that “Digger” was a musical and in view of the derivative dialogue in this film, an eco-musical, featuring “Heal the World” by Michael Jackson and “Beds are Burning” by Midnight Oil, would have been superior to what we are forced to listen to.Again, the buck stops with Mr. Iñárritu who directs with the subtlety of a Scientology recruitment video. While “Digger” is political in nature, it keeps the topical references minimal. There’s a throwaway reference to Al Gore but otherwise this is a case, not so much of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but “Tedious Director Syndrome.”While he has previously played a powerful spoiled brat in “Vanilla Sky” and dealt out well-worn liberal pieties in “Lions for Lambs,” the director has fundamentally misunderstood that Mr. Cruise is at his best in conventional settings where he has to figure out a resolution, often on his own, not in an offbeat film in which he is zanily entrusted with picking up the pieces of the mess he has caused.Given the misfiring nature of “Digger,” it is all too easy to overlook its virtues. Jesse Plemons delivers an outstanding performance as Digger’s nephew Kenny Rockwell. The picture looks good, thanks to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and displays a verve that was absent during its writing.Ultimately, though, “Digger” is one of those films in which the onscreen fate of the world becomes secondary to the growing fear that the painful picture you are watching may never end. For the past half-decade, Mr. Cruise has, with considerable justification, been held up as the one-man saviour of a Hollywood depleted by the pandemic and an increasing disinclination to entertain. But this is a post-“Mission Impossible” missed opportunity. “Digger” is exactly the kind of bombastic nonsense Tom Cruise was supposed to save us from.Mr. Cruise will surely be back to his best before too ling. Meantime, his new film seems desperate to want us to come out of the movie theater asking questions about the state of the world. But the sole question it provoked in me was whether the only thing worse than a celebrity flying by private jet to lecture us about ecology is a Hollywood celebrity expressing the same sentiment in an expensive blockbuster.

‘Digger’ Buries Tom Cruise in Overblown and Underwhelming Climate Change Satire

‘Digger’ Buries Tom Cruise in Overblown and Underwhelming Climate Change Satire

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