Love it or hate it, Digger demands your attention

Around 40 minutes into Tom Cruise’s new movie, Digger, the movie does something that will either have you leaning in, or it will be the moment when the movie loses you entirely.

With this year marking 40 years since Top Gun made him a global icon, an Oscar has eluded the man who has survived divorce, studio mergers, box office bombs and the shift from audiences going to the cinema to watching movies at home.

Over the course of Cruise’s career, he has shown a willingness to handpick interesting, left-of-centre directors to work with.

In 1996, he hand-picked Brian De Palma to direct the first Mission Impossible; he gave one of his best performances ever under the direction of Michael Mann in Collateral in 2004, and now he is looking to repeat that success with Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Iñárritu was the man behind the camera when Leonardo DiCaprio won an Oscar for The Revenant in 2016, and Cruise has hitched his wagon to the Mexican auteur.

The press tour for Digger has seen Cruise give interviews for the first time in over a decade, and audiences have seen the photos and clips; he has put on a lot of makeup and is doing a weird voice in a bid to win an Oscar.

In Digger, Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon who causes a major global disaster and is tasked with stopping it before it is too late.

In the broadest sense, the film is a comedy (to its detriment), and the film is attempting to be Dr. Strangelove for the TikTok generation.

So, how is the movie itself?

In a somewhat fitting fashion, if you showed 100 people this movie, 50 of them would like it, and 50 of them would hate it.

For the purposes of this review, we can say that we liked it, but with the caveat that it is almost certainly the most polarising film we’ve reviewed in quite some time.

Discussing why we liked Digger would require spoiling certain plot points, so in a very Iñárritu way we are telling you, the reader, to put down your copy of this newspaper, go and see the movie, and pick it back up later.

While the other readers are gone, we will explain why this movie largely works in some areas and falls flat in others.

Dr. Strangelove works because it is a mix of Stanley Kubrick’s jet-black humour and Peter Sellers’ wacky comedic sensibilities; the two meet in the middle to create a parable that is as biting now as it was in 1964.

The problem with Digger is that Iñárritu’s style of comedy is as subtle as a brick through the window, and we have known for years that whenever Cruise tries comedy, it is try-hard and desperate.

Digger is very much a satire, but it forgets a crucial detail: satires are supposed to be funny.

Iñárritu’s style of comedy has always been too broad for its own good, which is best demonstrated in Birdman.

Iñárritu likes to run the same joke into the ground until it is deep enough underground to strike oil (fitting, considering the main character at the heart of Digger).

Cruise, to his credit, fully hands himself over to his director, and you can’t accuse Cruise of being vain or arrogant here.

He allows himself to look dishevelled and weird, and is more than happy to torch his public persona in a bid to make this movie work.

When you think of the legendary actors that Cruise has worked with in the past (Paul Newman in The Color of Money, Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men), it is hard to imagine actors like Newman and Nicholson going as all-out as Cruise does here.

It is then a shame that the rest of the movie around him is largely a wash until the halfway point.

The satire isn’t subtle in any shape or form; you see John Goodman as the eccentric, old American president, and you are instantly supposed to think of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

The plot (American companies are permitted to dig for oil in Greenland) is ripped from the headlines, and the film asks you to sit in it.

Halfway through the film, Cruise gives a massive West Wing-style speech, done in one largely unbroken take, where he criticises you, the audience, for being slaves to cheap oil.

At one stage, Cruise looks directly down the camera lens and lectures the audience for being addicted to next-day Amazon delivery and for not attempting to break away from oil dependence because it would mean having the convenience of modern life taken away from them.

We used a brick through the window analogy earlier; this particular scene is someone running into your bedroom at 3 in the morning with a power drill and an electric guitar and screaming into your face.

And yet, the lack of subtlety and nuance is the point of Digger.

Tom Cruise deconstructs his movie star persona in Digger

Previous climate change parables such as Don’t Look Up tell the audience they are stupid for not taking the perils of climate change seriously; Digger goes one step further and tells the audience they are outright complicit in it.

Which brings us to why we are recommending this movie.

As stated, this movie is not going to work for everyone; it is a movie that is designed to split audiences right down the middle.

We are praising the movie for being brash and unsubtle, which is also a valid reason to hate this film.

The old Latin phrase “errare humanum est” comes to mind here; to err is human.

Digger is messy, sloppy and unfocused; it states its thesis so many times that it borders on self-parody, the subtext is the text in this movie.

In spite of this, it is also immensely watchable; in the age of AI and people being afraid to take a risk, a film like this should be celebrated.

Digger comes to us from Warner Brothers, who are in the process of being folded into the Trump-backed Paramount.

Under the new Paramount regime, it is unlikely that a film this nakedly political and strident will be allowed to slip by under the guise of David Ellison.

In recent weeks, Ellison has already greenlit a sequel to Days Of Thunder, which is telling audiences in advance that Cruise will retreat into the comfort blanket of nostalgia and familiarity in the event that Digger flops.

You don’t have to like or love Digger, but you also don’t get to complain about endless sequels and reboots if you don’t support original films like this.

Digger wants to stir a reaction from the audience and pokes at uncomfortable truths about our modern society.

When the Young British Artists broke out in the 1990s (Damien Hirst, Steve McQueen, et al), it provoked a reaction and a conversation about what exactly do we value in our art.

Now, Iñárritu and Cruise are inviting the audience to poke at the collective scab; what do audiences really value in their movies, do they want risk-taking or the same old thing as always?

In his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “buy the ticket, take the ride; if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”

We are imploring our readers to do the same.