Digger plays like a two-hour SNL skit, an exhilaratingly exhausting satire that is both wildly ambitious and relentlessly annoying. That Tom Cruise gives one of his best and most immersive performances is almost beside the point.
A movie that fluctuates from energetic flourishes to tedious monologues, it’s hard to describe exactly what Digger is or what the experience is like. It’s weird, it’s off kilter, and it absolutely knows it: director Alejandro G. Iñárritu gives zero f**ks as he hits his unsuspecting audience (no one will walk out of this going “yep, that’s what I was expecting”) with one of the boldest and wildest films of the year—even if the final product is a mess that most people will hate.
With a boisterous Tom Cruise looking fatter, older, and paler and stroking a purposefully fake-looking haggard-near-death cat, Digger itself immediately establishes itself as the anti-Tom Cruise Tom Cruise movie. There will be no running scenes here. Cruise is nearly unrecognizable, his makeup impressive but his performance moreso. He’s bombastic and uncouth, a crazed caricature of sociopathic oil tycoons–and Cruise showcases (again) that he is an actor of immense and underappreciated talent.
He’s not alone. John Goodman, playing an exaggerated (slightly exaggerated?) version of a Trump-like president, is absolutely stellar; he gives audiences the most crazed performance of the year (Cruise’s comes in a close second). Riz Ahmed is also terrific.
Long story short, the acting in Digger is not the problem. The problem: Digger is balls-to-the-wall crazy, and not in a good way. A political satire that is so over the top and relentlessly in your face that its core message gets overwhelmed by everything else around it, Digger just is too much, all the time.
It has entertaining bits, profound monologues, and a visual aesthetic that works in spite of itself, but as a whole it’s frustratingly tedious. Each individual moment has its qualities, but it feels like one of those overly long SNL skits that simply never end, the punchline beaten into the ground long ago.
I can’t in good conscience recommend Digger, and yet there is something to its controlled chaos that almost has to be seen–no, experienced–because no review, no analysis, no essay can capture the highs and lows this movie achieves.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.