“Digger” is an ambitious satire about an oil tycoon and the government dealing with a potential environmental disaster. It’s the new film from award-winning director Alejandro Iñárritu, known for films such as Best Picture winner “Birdman” and “The Revenant.”
Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, an eccentric oil tycoon focused on maximizing oil production while tending to his aging, sickly cat. He ignores a multitude of warnings from his environmental safety team that his operations are contributing to a growing crack in Greenland’s ice sheet. An explosion sets free a massive iceberg that, if it hits Europe, would create a devastating flood.
With only a few days to act, the powerful Digger meets with the bombastic President Compson (John Goodman) and his cabinet, consisting of a wimpy vice president, hawkish military leaders, and a religious advisor. Together, the incompetent committee ignores the advice of experts and addresses the situation with political spin and bombs.
Leading the chaos is Tom Cruise in heavy makeup. As the larger-than-life, good ol’ boy Digger, he initially seems miscast in a role tailor-made for Billy Bob Thornton. Yet Cruise’s performance makes sense within the context of the story. In fact, there’s no subtlety to any of the performances – or the film’s message, for that matter. The entire cast, which also features Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and Jesse Plemons, is dialed up to “11,” practically screaming, ‘Look at me being wacky!’ While it pays off later in a twist, the manic energy simply doesn’t work.
Ultimately, “Digger” is a Frankenstein’s monster assembled from movies like “Dr. Strangelove,” “Don’t Look Up,” and Iñárritu’s own “Birdman,” all in the style of a Wes Anderson film. It lacks the comedic timing of the great satires and completely misses its attempt at Anderson’s quirkiness. Like the monster, all the individual elements are viable. However, once assembled, it becomes a big, awkward, disjointed mess that is hard to like despite its good nature.
“Digger” is rated R for pervasive language and runs two hours and nine minutes. Since it was released during the baseball playoffs, it is safe to call this film a wild, two-out-of-five-stars swing and a miss.
