Digger review: Tom Cruise is fantastic, but you might hate the film

Alejandro G. Iñárritu's dark comedy tells the story of an evil oil tycoon and the end of the world

Rise early. Work hard. Strike oil.

Those words are etched into the wood on a mantel, in all caps, below a reverently displayed 10-cent shovel — a shovel that oil baron Digger Rockwell's grandfather purchased around the turn of the century and used to start the empire Digger himself now steers to global domination.

As the film opens, Digger (Tom Cruise) stands next to it while screaming down a trio of his walleyed climate-expert subordinates about their general lack of resolve. He is delivering a diatribe for the ages about his grandfather's legendary work ethic, about toiling in the dust and the dirt and nearly dying under the blistering sun and — wait a second. Why aren't they listening to his story?

Well, there are a few good reasons. The first being that the purpose of his tirade was to keep those experts from shutting down his oil rig in Greenland due to a widening crack in the ice shelf upon which it sits. But as of a few minutes ago, Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) explains, the crack itself ceased to be a problem. It is now a crater.

The result is a smouldering methane explosion directly caused by Digger's willful negligence that is sure to, at least, raise a few eyebrows from the families of all those dead oil workers. As well as from a few world governments.

The second reason no one feels like listening to Digger's personal history: U.S. President Compson (John Goodman) has just arrived, and will probably want to know why this accident now implicates him in a cascading climate catastrophe that could drown Norway — and that's just to start.

That's not to mention the ambitious, destabilizing narrative twist that elevates Alejandro G. Iñárritu's newest beyond-farcical fable into what it is — a surprise second strand to the story that, without giving away the game, has us questioning why we're watching this at all. It suggests that Iñárritu and his audience are engaging in the same self-satisfied ritual that got us into this real-life mess in the first place. Of using high-minded entertainment to point out, and joke about, our impending doom, as if that alone is admirable. As if that could change anything at all.

At least, that's what you could get from it. The winding, tongue-in-cheek story is typical Iñárritu in a way that makes its basic worldview feel self-evident: like the ego-destroying reckoning with our own insignificance in Biutiful; the fascinating futility of perseverance in The Revenant; or the vulnerable self-criticism against egotistical legacy-building in Birdman.

It’s all there as Digger freewheels between a madcap Cruise caring for his dying, 30-year-old corpse of a cat and screaming down pussy-footed eco-activists still blindly dependent on fossil fuels. Or as he delivers self-aggrandizing, Shakespearean monologues about his own virility in a lecture hall inexplicably populated by mannequins in wigs.

The story about a self-obsessed, self-mythologizing opportunist pillaging a dying planet for his own profits unravels into something stranger, more confusing, more barbed and angry and ultimately defeatist. Digger is a comedy in the way one could find their own funeral funny.

Explaining exactly why would probably be a mistake (though we can confirm this is unequivocally not a musical). Without quite getting close to M. Night Shyamalan territory, going in blind to Digger’s actual format is probably for the best. (For example, revealing how Jesse Plemons’s red-haired Svengali fits into all this would probably spoil the fun.) Because the befuddling delight in discovering exactly how Iñárritu has chosen to make his demoralizing point about where we’re all headed is one of the movie’s few uplifting spots.

Suffice it to say, this and Birdman — Iñárritu's Oscar-winning 2014 examination of a man at war with his pathetic and inescapable impulse to matter — share serious DNA. And without the reprieve offered by the surprise reveal, the rotating cast of idiot oligarchs, preening politicians and sad-eyed scientists steering the Earth straight off a cliff in search of endless profits would be a bit too on-the-nose.

Which is not to mention the stilted, infinitely self-aware style — anyone who felt Wes Anderson fell a little too in love with his own schtick in the relentlessly obscure Asteroid City should probably steer clear of this one.

Digger is built for smug unpacking and film-critic scene analyses — "inaccessible," "artifice" and "up-its-own" are the three descriptors you could most readily use to describe it. Alienatingly ambitious, as is often seen in works by esteemed directors late in their careers, Iñárritu's latest does perform like a riddle he expects you to solve. A uniformly colour-graded cartoon for pretentious, beige-loving children, the film's deliberate mix of vomit humour and metaphor-laden philosophizing seems to scream all three descriptions at you the whole time. Imagine Megalopolis if it was, somehow, actually good.

Megalopolis is one of the worst big-budget movies ever made

Asteroid City is a masterful puzzle — and likely to be Wes Anderson fans' most hated movie

Which raises the question of why Tom Cruise would want to take this project on. The 64-year-old actor's last movie that wasn’t a franchise-focused blockbuster came nearly a decade ago: 2017’s American Made. The last time he made such an obviously transgressive and politically relevant movie was — being generous — 2007's Lions for Lambs or 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July. Realistically, the actual answer is "probably never."

Cruise is fascinating here, delivering searing, complex, southern-inflected line after line, reminding you that he was once one of the most talented and interesting leading men in Hollywood. But why re-enter the critical limelight with this, a movie that seems to intentionally attack the current U.S. administration? Especially when he chose to avoid criticizing that same government when it proposed instituting tariffs designed to limit American productions' abilities to film abroad — a move that could easily have tanked his globetrotting Mission: Impossible series?

Maybe Digger allows Cruise to have his cake and eat it, too. Maybe the meta turn later on allows him to do something that equally doomeristic films like Don’t Look Up, Silent Night, Greenland or even the upcoming Musk documentary can’t.

Because even while partaking in the indulgent wave of multimillion-dollar films openly claiming capitalism has killed us all, Digger does something decidedly more Iñárritu. It turns inward, and then out at the audience. It acknowledges the situation, pointing to a likely future when stepping outside means stepping into a roiling cloud of poison and autonomous police bots with guns.

But it also asks: If we’re not going to do anything about it, what are we accomplishing here? Are we doing anything but stroking our own egos, distracting ourselves, by showing we understand a reality we’re powerless to fix? As it directly asks, are we so enthralled by our own opinions that we’ll happily keep arguing about them as the world crumbles around us?

Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, they’re maybe less politically dangerous questions for Cruise to ask. And newer ones for us to answer.

Jackson Weaver is a reporter and film critic for CBC's entertainment news team in Toronto. You can reach him at jackson.weaver@cbc.ca.