Review by Nik Mohan

There is something almost refreshing about watching a film as expensive, strange and proudly abrasive as 'Digger' arrive on the studio landscape. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s apocalyptic satire is not interested in behaving itself, and Tom Cruise — an actor who has spent much of the last two decades turning precision itself into a form of blockbuster entertainment — responds by delivering one of the loosest, loudest and most unapologetically bizarre performances of his career.

Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a grotesquely wealthy Texas oil magnate whose drilling operation in Greenland triggers an environmental catastrophe of potentially civilisation-ending proportions. Buried beneath prosthetics, a receding hairline, an exaggerated drawl and the inflated confidence of a man who has spent his life being told he is important, Cruise looks almost liberated by the opportunity to make himself ridiculous.

It would be easy to describe the performance as overacting, because it undoubtedly is. Cruise bellows, struts, preaches and throws himself into Digger’s absurd ego with tremendous physical commitment. Yet the excess feels intentional. This is not Ethan Hunt reluctantly saving humanity. Digger desperately wants to be recognised as humanity’s saviour, preferably while standing beneath a spotlight.

Iñárritu and his co-writers Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone construct 'Digger' as an increasingly surreal collision between ecological disaster movie, political farce and existential theatre piece. The obvious reference point is 'Dr. Strangelove', but 'Digger' is considerably less elegant about delivering its satire. It repeatedly underlines ideas that were already perfectly visible, occasionally behaving as though audiences might somehow miss the symbolism of billionaires, politicians and corporations attempting to manage a disaster created by the same systems that enriched them.

The result can be exhausting and exhaustion seems to be baked into Iñárritu’s design. 'Digger' presents a world permanently screaming at itself; politicians performing competence, corporations manufacturing narratives and wealthy men rewriting their own culpability in real time. Everyone is talking. Almost nobody is listening.

There is a terrific comic desperation underneath Cruise’s performance. Digger can barely distinguish between solving the crisis and protecting his legacy, and Cruise understands the pathetic insecurity hiding beneath the character’s colossal ego. One major public-speaking sequence allows him to transform what initially resembles another flamboyant caricature into something considerably more complicated. For all of Digger’s hypocrisy, the film occasionally lets him articulate uncomfortable truths about society’s dependency on the industries it publicly condemns.

Cruise has always been an unusually physical actor, but 'Digger' reminds us how entertaining he can be when that physicality is deployed for comedy rather than survival. His body becomes part of the joke: the swagger, the gestures, the carefully manufactured confidence. There are echoes of his wonderfully obnoxious work in 'Tropic Thunder', although 'Digger' eventually asks considerably more from him.

The supporting cast operates within varying degrees of absurdity. Riz Ahmed provides one of the film’s more grounded presences, while John Goodman gleefully embraces Iñárritu’s grotesque political universe. Sandra Hüller, Sophie Wilde, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons populate the increasingly frantic orbit around Digger, although the film’s obsession with its protagonist means several characters feel more like satellites than fully formed people.

If the screenplay occasionally lacks restraint, the filmmaking certainly does not lack imagination.

Reuniting with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu gives 'Digger' an enormous visual personality. The camera glides through corporate interiors, political chambers and landscapes with an almost unnerving confidence, shifting between absurd intimacy and apocalyptic scale. The compositions frequently make people look tiny inside institutions they supposedly control.

Dennis Gassner’s production design is similarly impressive, building a world that feels recognisably contemporary while being pushed just far enough toward caricature to become unsettling. The technical craft is frequently magnificent even when the narrative underneath it becomes deliberately unstable.

'Digger' eventually begins questioning the very storytelling machinery it has spent much of its runtime constructing. The tonal transition will almost certainly divide audiences. What begins as a broad environmental satire gradually mutates into something stranger, sadder and considerably more self-reflexive.

There are moments when Iñárritu’s ambition outpaces the film’s emotional depth. Characters become ideas, ideas become speeches and speeches occasionally become lectures. The satire is often funniest when Iñárritu simply allows these ridiculous people to expose themselves, and least effective when the screenplay explains precisely what we are supposed to understand about them.

'Digger' could have been a straightforward billionaire takedown or another polished climate-crisis drama. Instead, Iñárritu makes something closer to an apocalyptic carnival: loud, pretentious, funny, frustrating, visually astonishing and periodically brilliant.

Cruise, crucially, never hedges his bets. At a stage in his career when he could comfortably continue playing immaculate action heroes, he instead chooses to appear ridiculous, unpleasant and vulnerable. It is the sort of reckless performance movie stars rarely allow themselves anymore.

'Digger' is imperfect precisely because it wants to do almost everything at once. It wants to mock capitalism, interrogate celebrity, confront climate anxiety, ridicule political theatre and eventually question whether storytelling itself has any meaningful power against catastrophe.

'Digger' may be one of the most divisive studio films of the year. It is also one of the few willing to genuinely risk looking foolish in pursuit of something interesting. And in an increasingly cautious blockbuster landscape, that recklessness feels strangely valuable.

Our score: ★★★★☆