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.

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.

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