Digger review: 'Tom Cruise's commitment to his fat-suit doesn't matter'
The self-congratulatory backslapping this film indulges in proves its biggest liability, writes Alistair Harkness
Digger (15) ★★
“How Tom Cruise Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Bomb” could be title of the studio marketing department’s last-minute efforts to get ahead of the disastrous reception to his new film Digger. Creating a new ad campaign days before release by juxtaposing negative responses alongside influencer-sourced superlatives to bolster audience curiosity, this thunder-stealing stunt actually feels like a natural extension of the movie itself.
Co-written and directed by Alejandro G. Iñnáritu (the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revanant), Digger fancies itself as a Dr Strangelove-style exposé of corporate America’s negligent response to the climate emergency. Yet the film has so little faith in our ability to get this that it approaches the subject with a tiresome meta framing device designed to let Iñnáritu “control the narrative” by repeatedly commenting on its own status as a satire, even stopping the action at one point to explain to us why Cruise’s character, a corpulent oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell, is funny.
That no actual laughs are forthcoming from Cruise’s commitment to his fat-suit and balding pate (a re-run of his try-hard comedy turn as a Hollywood agent in Tropic Thunder) doesn’t even matter, because before long the film gives itself a get-out-of-jail free card by having another character comment on how cartoonish he is. On and on this goes. As the plot keeps circling around the catastrophic environmental fall-out of Digger’s latest Arctic drilling operation, Iñnárittu repeatedly pulls the curtain back on his own virtuosic technique so he can belabour his point about our cathartic need for a villain. The self-congratulatory backslapping the film indulges in proves its biggest liability.
Digger is in cinemas now
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