Digger movie review: Tom Cruise’s acting comeback never stops shouting at you

Shovel violence is an easy-to-reach-for metaphor. Unfortunately for Digger, the new Tom Cruise movie, it’s right there on the poster.

Hit you over the head with a shovel, smack you in the face with a shovel.

That’s what watching Digger feels like, to be continuously assaulted by its insistence of maximum stimulation of all the senses, all the time. It makes you want to hide under a blanket and put in some earplugs.

It. Is. A. Lot.

To be fair, it’s not without some merits. There are aspects that are intentionally funny and rightly elicit a laugh or three. There are other parts that are actually really impressive, especially from a filmmaking perspective.

There’s a minutes-long one-shot scene involving Cruise, hundreds of background actors, an arena, a stream of dialogue and jumping (not on a couch but over benches) that is genuinely mesmerising, especially once you’ve tuned out all the screaming.

And then there’s Cruise, who, like the film, seems to be inexhaustible, but he wears it much better than the movie.

Cruise gives a full-throated performance as Digger Rockwell, an influential oil tycoon whose drilling operations in Greenland lead to environmental catastrophe. Naturally, he and a boardroom full of equally corpse-like US government leaders are now the ones in charge of fixing it.

Saving the world is all well and good, as long as Digger gets to preserve his billion-dollar oil business.

There’s a structural twist early on which leads to a moment of “wait, what is this movie, actually?” although that question resolves itself without too much consternation. But it does point to the larger issue in that there is just so much going on.

Heaps of characters, for one, including the decrepit American president (John Goodman), a frenzied scientist (Riz Ahmed), Digger’s half-sister (Sandra Huller), a weak-sauce vice-president (Michael Stuhlbarg), and characters played by Sophie Wilde and Jesse Plemons, both of whom you can’t describe without spoiling the reveal.

Director and co-writer Alejandro G. Inarritu is trying for Dr Strangelove for the climate age, but many of the extreme tropes he’s drawing on feel like relics from decades earlier - there’s a reference to Al Gore that’s been timeshifted from 2007.

It also lets Big Tech, AI and data centres off the hook, except for one reference to online manipulation that positions those scenes as taking place in our current moment. A strange, perhaps revealing, omission for 2026.

Maybe Inarritu and his collaborators feel that there’s a sense of urgency in how long global leaders have opted to do barely anything about impending disaster and the time for nuance and subtlety is long gone.

But there are no new ideas or creative executions here, and certainly a movie that takes a beat to actually explain why something is satire means it’s failed at satire.

We know, we get it, we got it when Goodman’s American president linked the fate of the world to his debilitating arse cancer.

In some ways, Digger has been hamstrung by how it can market itself so whatever expectations you have for the movie is likely to be slightly off from the real thing.

It can’t straight up sell itself as a climate change comedy because that’s not the drawcard it was back in the An Inconvenient Truth days, and it can’t tip its oil baron hat to the real layers of the story.

So it’s been relying, in smaller part, on the narrative of Inarritu as audacious filmmaker (The Revenant, Amos Perros, Birdman), but mostly on this being the culmination of Cruise’s career.

Digger has been marketing itself on the allure of Cruise because he hasn’t played a character that wasn’t Ethan Hunt or Maverick since 2017, and he hasn’t played a non-action hero role since 2012.

Cruise as cinematic stuntman and champion of big screen experiences has been a useful narrative in re-framing his stardom, away from the Scientology quagmire of the 2000s.

So, trying to re-establish himself as an actor-actor, the guy who was once in Magnolia and Born on the Fourth of July, is not without risk.

He’s good here, and it’s a role that also gels with Cruise’s intensity in all aspects of his persona. You can’t argue that he didn’t go for it.

But the movie doesn’t live up to its or Cruise’s ambitions. It doesn’t stop shouting at you – literally and metaphorically – long enough to be much more than a cacophonous ride you want to get off.

Rating: 2/5

Digger is in cinemas from October 1