REVIEW: “Digger” (2026)

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Two-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu teaming up with America’s biggest movie star Tom Cruise is the kind of collaboration that should get everyone excited. But after the trailers dropped for their new $180 million feature, it was pretty clear this movie wasn’t made for the masses. In fact, you can sense it furiously striving to be as divisive as possible and then using that division as a sales pitch. Judging by the early box office numbers, that clearly didn’t work.

Some will certainly consider “Digger” to be a bold and fearless swing by the acclaimed Mexican director. But for my money, Iñárritu’s previous film, 2022’s equally divisive “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths”, was a far more audacious project. It was weird, surreal, and extravagantly self-indulgent. Yet it was a deeply personal and emotionally honest self-reflection. Iñárritu’s latest is its own kind of crazy yet without even a tinge of genuine humanity.

Rarely has a movie been more in love with itself than “Digger”. When not drowning us in pomp and bombast, the movie spends its time sanctimoniously screaming at the top of its lungs about capitalism and climate change while vainly hiding its finger-wagging behind a see-through veil of absurdity and nonsense. It never hides its intent to be a full-blown satire. But the surface-level preachiness and glaring lack of laughs weigh it all down. It ends up being too shallow to be challenging and too obnoxious to be funny.

Image Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

To Cruise’s credit, he fully commits to playing Digger Rockwell, an outlandish oil tycoon who some consider to be the most powerful man in the world. With his wild gray hair, pasty white skin, and go-for-broke nuttiness, Cruise’s performance is unlike anything he has done before. His Digger is Iñárritu’s central character, main villain, and biggest punchline, who sets out to save the world from an environmental catastrophe that his company created.

Iñárritu navigates his over-the-top yet toothless satire with the subtly of an out of control freight train. Working from an exasperating script he co-wrote with Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolás Giacobone, Iñárritu often finds himself trapped in between talking down to his audience through self-righteous sermonizing and completely losing them amid the numbingly non-stop antics that mutes any sense of urgency in his message.

It’s hard to fault Cruise who seems to be doing all that’s asked of him. As Digger he channels everything from his very own Les Grossman to Texas businessman and presidential candidate Ross Perot. It’s Digger’s negligence that triggers a destructive chain of events at his oil operation in Greenland, which sends an ice shelf 5x the size of Washington DC barreling towards Europe. With impact predicted within three days and casualties expected to be in the hundreds of thousands, Digger joins the government’s top cronies in shaping the narrative to their benefit.

Image Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

Digger’s chief ally is US President Compson (John Goodman) who colluded with Rockwell United to extract oil from Greenland and Alaska. Compson is every bit as preposterous as Digger, with Goodman relentlessly shouting into oblivion while repeatedly using his character’s rectal cancer as a gag. Surrounding Compson is his moronic cabinet who are nothing more than a collection of conservative caricatures. And the jokes we get from them are some of the laziest the film offers.

“Digger” features many more talented performers who find themselves hemmed in by the movie’s overpowering self-indulgence. Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons, Robert John Burke, Burn Gorman, Emma D’Arcy – some have good moments, but they all find themselves wasted to different degrees. But ultimately the movie revolves around Cruise who certainly grabs the most attention. The problem is Digger never comes across as a real character. Instead it’s as if Cruise is trapped in a never-ending series of unfunny Saturday Night Live skits.

The one place “Digger” does excel is with its visuals. Iñárritu is too good of a craftsman for this not to be a thoroughly impressive spectacle from its cinematography to the production design. But a great cast and eye-popping craftsmanship can’t save “Digger” from being a grueling endurance test, all the way through to its unearned self-congratulatory ending. It’s brazenly ridiculous, often confounding, and at times downright annoying. “Digger” will certainly get people talking. And I’m betting much of the chatter will be asking how talents like Iñárritu and Cruise could miss so badly.

VERDICT – 1.5 STARS

40 thoughts on “REVIEW: “Digger” (2026)”

  2. Two disappointments in a row. I was planning to see this and Primetime. Now am left with considering either Boiuna or Practical magic 2.

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  3. I was afraid of this. Some of these movies would do better as a short released straight to streaming. It reminds me of Meet the Parents, the first act was hilarious, but then it just kept on and on and to me got to where it wasn’t funny anymore.

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    • LOL. It’s turned out to be wildly divisive. For me, it felt like a run of bad SNL skits, over-the-top and with no human pulse whatsoever. I also don’t like being talked down to, which this movie does repeatedly with its sanctimonious finger-wagging.

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    • Only after they convince all the alien body thetans implanted throughout them by Xenu to leave by talking with them while using the e-meter. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

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  7. I’m going to wait for this on streaming. I do like Inarritu although if you were to ask where I would rank him among the likes of other revered Mexican filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuaron, and Carlos Reygadas. He’d be fourth. Guillermo is #1 with Alfonso at #2. The reason I have Reygadas at #3 is that even though his films are not accessible to wide audiences as they can be seen as pretentious and slow. I think he is a better filmmaker as he does take risks but only to serve the story he is telling no matter how slow it is.

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  8. The fact that Tom Cruise chose to “act” in this monumental mishap of a movie just shows how vain he really is. I can only surmise that Mr. Cruise feels he is so great that he can pull off any story line, no matter how absurd. Better luck next time Tom Cruise.

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  12. Keith, you and I apparently watched two different movies. As someone with a main gig of reviewing movies, I would expect more accuracy in a review.

    ‘Climate Change’… There’s not a dingle reference to climate in the entire film. The iceberg was broken off by overextraction that destabilized the sea floor under the ice shelf and triggered by an explosion.

    “The problem is Digger never comes across as a real character.” Digger is a CHARICATURE, not a human character.

    “over-the-top…satire”… Some of the satire is overhthehrop, as satire tends to be. However, much of it is subtle and extremely clever. So much so that I wondered if mainstram audiences would notice it.

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    • 1. The critique of what humanity is doing to the earth is undeniably woven into the very fabric of this movie. One of its central criticisms revolves around denial and negligence.

      2. Of course. But for many people there’s a problem with that. It can be hard to connect with a character (or a movie) with no human pulse or soul. Digger is too big of a clown to be taken seriously, even though he tries hard with his Gordon Gekko monologue.

      3. But never over-the-top to the point of drowning out the message you’re trying to convey. Clearly it wasn’t that bad for you, but it certainly was for me.

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  13. The various reviews on this have been…interesting. Because of its star and the fact so much was spent on making this film look and sound good (saw it in IMAX), it would of course have been impossible to restrict this when it first opened to art houses. That might – might – have given it a better chance to build an audience rather than get slammed by half the critics. This kind of severe, over-the-top farcical performance is one I associate with art-house cinema anyway opposed to shopping mall cinema. I was also expecting at least some level of this from Inarritu based on his Birdman. When all is said and done, I’m glad I saw it, admittedly admiring it way more than loving it. Inarritu and Cruise took a big swing, and it is most definitely not for everyone, but it made a memorable impression on me at a time when many movies do not.

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  14. I saw a trailer last summer that was just a clip-show from Tom Cruise’s entire film career, and that was a bad sign that they were hiding the actual movie they were advertising. And then I saw a trailer with actual footage from Digger and it looked terrible.

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  19. Sometimes success is merely having the opportunity to collaborate, direct and perform in any movie that becomes available to us.

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