For the first time in more than a decade, Tom Cruise is stepping away from the action genre and revisiting his weird cinema roots.
In the new movie Digger, written and directed by The Revenant and Birdman’s Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu, Tom takes the lead as an eccentric oil tycoon who accidentally unleashes an ecological disaster that threatens all of humanity.
Initial reactions to its first screenings on social media were markedly split, with some admiring the ambition of the satirical drama, while others were more critical, declaring it “less of a bang and more of a hollow misfire”.
Now that more in-depth reviews are out, critics remain just as divided about Digger.
While most applaud Digger’s sheer audacity, the film has been called “aggressively unfunny,” “pretentious” and generally “pointless”, while more positive reviews have hailed it as “thrilling” and “terrific fun”.
Here’s a quick selection of what’s been said about Digger…
“You thought the trailer was tedious? Try spending more than two hours with someone who’s busting a rubber gut to be funny and wacky, but is actually painful in a manner that crudely flattens every scene into exhausting “look at me” histrionics, like a toddler in a Spider-Man costume – or a poodle with a new trim.”
“Digger is both [director Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s] most ambitious work yet and one that arrives, in all its American grotesquerie, with the all the force of a light breeze. It’s simply not mean enough to mean enough.”
“Digger certainly resonates with Donald Trump’s greedy urge to despoil the Arctic and everywhere else. Yet there is something glib and overblown here. This film finds itself in a postmodern hole. And what do you do when you’re in a hole?”
“The trouble with Iñárritu’s pretentious frame story (sorry to be so vague) is that it causes us to not take about 90% of the movie seriously and to zone out for long stretches. There are no stakes to be found and no laughs to be had. There’s certainly no point.”
“For a film about the complexity of mankind, it shows scant interest in actual people.”
“If Cruise hadn’t spent the last 15 years trying not to be that Tom Cruise, Digger wouldn’t be so weighted by expectations. And without them, Digger could exist as it perhaps should: as a quirky entry in Cruise’s rich filmography, a noble failed experiment.
“As things are, though, Digger isn’t a successful enough movie to perform the job it’s been conscripted into. For all his skills, even Tom Cruise can’t dig upward.”
“Digger is what happens when you give the week’s worst Saturday Night Live sketch an inexplicably large budget and delusions of grandeur.”
“There’s no hope in Digger, only a seductive, mischievous malevolence that, by design, feels empty as soon as the end credits roll.”
“It’s a movie that sets out to be divisive, and no doubt many will applaud its extravagant display of what passes for audaciousness and originality. But put me in the camp of those who most definitely did not dig it.”
“Digger isn’t funny. It’s nervy, in your face, adventurous, and bizarro in a free-swinging, out-of-the-box way. And it feels like a comedy, since it’s fuelled by the relentless overacting of a bad Coen brothers movie.”
“Digger is more interesting visually than narratively, a film remarkably pleased with itself for achieving so little, the cinematic equivalent of a billionaire expecting gratitude for a tax-deductible charitable gift.”
“The ideas are seldom the problem in his [Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu] films. On the contrary, the issue once again is that his spectacle-driven simulacra is rooted in the lies we tell ourselves rather than the truths we hope to bury underneath them, and so his hyper-conceptual comedies invariably seem as if they’re built on the watery quicksand of a mixed metaphor.”
“Through the whole of this aggressively unfunny, boneheaded farce, Cruise’s Digger stomps and swaggers, bellows and bloviates. He doesn’t speak his lines, he flings them, like unguided missiles in a cafeteria food fight.”
“For a film so desperate to posture as a comedy, there is too much didactic anger, and even more smug self-satisfaction, for this basic objective to be fulfilled: it fails at being funny, and thus there is little catharsis in its doom prophesying.”
“The craft is knowingly hollow, which makes the sturdy artificiality that mirrors the stage’s uncanny valley tactility all the more impressive. But the longer Iñárritu takes to get to the bottom of his film, the bigger the hole he digs becomes. He strays so far from his initial points that it’s hard to tell what he wanted this bottomless egotistical film to be, say, and feel.”
“Digger itself exists in that perpetually uncertain state, and I’m not sure whether the debate it’s having with itself about art’s impotence in the face of catastrophe is one it can, or even wants to, resolve. But what a thrill to watch Iñárritu and Cruise hash it out with so much beauty, daring and extravagance.”
“But you have to hand it to Cruise. When he’s making an action blockbuster, he wants it to showcase the most outrageous stunts ever seen. And when he’s making an oddball apocalyptic tragicomedy, he goes for it with the same limitless, daredevil ambition.”
“There are beautiful aftershocks to Iñárritu’s cinematic coup as this gallops towards a heartbreaking warning about where the real world is right now with fossil fuels and climate change.
“Audacious, risky, terrific fun and – for at least half the planet – the wildest ride you’ll get this year.”
Digger is out in cinemas on Friday 2 October.
