MOVIES: Digger (2026,  Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

Already firmly ensconced as the biggest flop of the year, maybe of the decade. But while it is indeed not a good movie, it's not as bad as you may have heard, and there are some things in it that I liked very much.

The challenge for my purposes here is that there is a major reveal about 30 minutes into the movie which should not be given away (too many reviews have, so read with caution), and it's hard to talk about a lot of the movie without spoiling things.

We open in the mansion of oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise, buried in prosthetics and a fat suit), who is getting the news from assorted underlings of a disaster at his oil field in Greenland. A massive ice shelf has broken off the coast and is drifting into the North Sea, where it is likely to cause catastrophic tsunamis and flooding throughout northern Europe.

Digger's head of environmental security (Riz Ahmed) shows up to tell him that, no, the folks in Greenland are not exaggerating; it really is going to be that bad. So Digger meets with the blustery President (John Goodman), the ineffectual Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg), and the Cabinet -- all of whom come to his mansion, because he's just that important -- to discuss the crisis.

It's at about this point that the major reveal lands, and it forces us to recontextualize everything we've seen. Some of the movie's stranger choices -- the generally enormous acting styles, some set design eccentricities -- begin to make more sense, and Cruise takes on a second character (who isn't nearly as interesting as Digger).

Critics have been strongly divided on whether what Cruise is doing here is good acting, but there's no doubt that it's a lot of acting, or that he's making very big choices. Sometimes they work: A scene in which Digger addresses the world's political leaders, giving his version of the "you can't handle the truth" speech from A Few Good Men, is the movie's high point, aided greatly by striking costuming that has Digger in a dark reddish brown suit, sharply popping against the greys and beiges of all the other suits and of the room itself.

Riz Ahmed is the most successful in finding a way to fit in with the general bombast while still finding some room for subtlety and understatement; and in a smaller role, Jesse Plemons does very well with a monologue late in the film that drops the movie's other big twist/reveal. The rest of the cast is generally weighted down by Iñárritu's directing choices and by the clomping screenplay (by Iñárritu and multiple collaborators).

This is very much a story about men. At one point during one of the Cabinet meetings, the President scolds someone for cursing: "Watch your language, there are ladies present!" Everyone looks around and bursts into laughter, because of course, there are no women in the room. Sandra Hüller has the largest female role in the movie -- she's Digger's sister and business partner -- and she's barely present.

Ultimately, though, the movie's a mess. The exaggerated volume and style of the performances is eventually explained, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant to watch. There is too much reliance on a handful of unfunny jokes, such as Goodman's President being forced to explain repeatedly that he has "cancer of the asshole."

But the movie looks remarkable; Ahmed is quite good; and if nothing else, it's nice to be reminded that Cruise can do something more than run really fast and perform elaborate stunts. Give him a real part to play, and a director who will push him to use all of his skill, and he can do some fine acting. I fear that the poor reception of Digger will send him running away from ever taking such chances again, and that he'll be content to spend the rest of his life making fourteen more Mission: Impossible movies.