The Digger reviews do not hold back.
The positive reviews contain strong superlatives praising Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s bold new film starring Tom Cruise, and the negative reviews are utterly scathing.
Is Digger a 5-out-of-5 “audacious, risky, terrific fun” — like The London Evening Standard says?
Or is Digger a one-half-of-a-point out of 5, “a film full of mostly talented people doing the worst work of their careers” — as Slant says?
Right out of the gate on Rotten Tomatoes, the Warner Bros. film is hovering around a dead even 50 percent split.
In Digger, a nearly unrecognizable Tom Cruise plays an oblivious oil tycoon whose drilling in Greenland dislodges an ice shelf from a glacier that’s going to cause a global disaster. He must race to prove that he’s humanity’s savior before the ecological accident wreaks havoc on the planet. The film also stars Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons.
Here are some of the official reviews of Digger from top critics:
The Hollywood Reporter: “A climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic it makes Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up seem almost innocuous. Digger is basically what happens when you put two outsize egos together with nobody holding the reins to keep their most self-indulgent impulses in check … so meta that you watch in excruciating weariness as [the film] disappears up its own ass and then realize to your dismay that there’s another eardrum-shattering hour left to endure …It’s difficult to imagine mainstream audiences ever wanting to be a part of this bludgeoning ordeal.”
IndieWire: “Digger is a mega-budget Dr. Strangelove riff so detached from human truth that its most believable character is a one-eyed animatronic cat named Maggie — a VistaVision satire so high-concept that it would be more accurate to measure its running time in altitude than minutes …Digger is a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat, with Iñárritu frantically hoping to pile them tall enough that they stand on their own without tipping over … If Digger bombs as hard as I fear it will, it may prove to be a more damning portrait of self-delusion than Iñárritu ever intended.”
New York Post: “[Cruise’] first real stinker in nearly 10 years … Audiences will urgently want to leave after the first five minutes … this is not simply a case of poor Tom being trapped in a lousy movie. He’s just not very good, even as a cartoony caricature with no depth. Cruise did this kind of thing vastly better when he played Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. I would’ve rather seen Nicholas Cage or Woody Harrelson as Digger.”
Empire: “This is the film’s chief problem — that it appears more concerned with itself than with the audience. Its apparent message — that the planet’s dying and we’re complicit, as much as we crave villains to blame — is delivered in almost hectoring terms, often in loud monologues …If the whole isn’t successful, elements are. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography and Dennis Gassner’s production design achieve the Kubrickian grandeur Iñárritu clearly intends. Cruise emerges with a win, reminding us how riveting he can be as an actor, not just as a movie star.”
Deadline: “For me it is like a return to the kind of adventurous films in cinema’s groundbreaking era of the 70’s, but it isn’t easily defined … [Cruise’s] range is undeniable but here it is off the charts, especially in a stunning 10 minute monologue Digger delivers that admits guilt but seeks to place the blame collectively on all of us… Iñárritu again proves he is one of the most original and fascinating filmmakers working today. Digger is the kind of movie we don’t see often on this scale, an ambitious satire that entertains, takes chances, sparks arguments, but is thrillingly alive as cinema designed to make us look at ourselves, hopefully wake up before it is too late, and ask the question: ‘what the hell are we doing?”
BBC: “Most people won’t go to see it – and some people who do will walk out halfway through. But that doesn’t mean that Digger is a failure …Personally, I loved it. Some of its excesses are, well, a bit too excessive, and most viewers will wish it was shorter. After about 90 minutes, you get tired of close-ups of Goodman yelling while snake-sized veins bulge out of his forehead. But when Cruise is clambering all over the set, delivering thunderous lectures on the oil industry, I couldn’t help grinning at the gargantuan scale of his performance, the conviction of the script’s grim environmental message, and Iñárritu’s antic style.”
The Wrap: “Digger is what happens when you give the week’s worst Saturday Night Live sketch an inexplicably large budget and delusions of grandeur … In Digger, Tom Cruise also plays a villainous Foghorn Leghorn, but his version is a seductive, intriguing enigma that takes center stage. It’s the kind of movie about evil billionaires that evil billionaires would enjoy, which makes it the worst kind of movie about evil billionaires.”
The Los Angeles Times: “Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger is a bizarre stunt made on a big studio budget, a climate change satire that’s a self-conscious hybrid of Stanley Kubrick and Bertolt Brecht … But the horrible hijinks in Digger are so close to reality that, exiting the film, I was less sure than ever that humanity will still be around. There’s no hope in Digger, only a seductive, mischievous malevolence that, by design, feels empty as soon as the end credits… while I don’t entirely love this strange comedy, I’m giddy that it’s lurched into existence.”
USA Today: “Digger crafts an unorthodox, complicated narrative with colorful archetypes that reflect the power players in our own world, so their goofy semi-villainy leans amusing and a little depressing. It might also prove divisive for audiences, which could keep a deserving Cruise out of an ultra-competitive Oscar race … Iñárritu does give the movie heart, however, and with his star really going for it in a fashion he hasn’t in quite a while, one can at least appreciate its earnest aims.”
The Guardian: “As with Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, there may be a tacit consensus, understandable at some level, that at least we have a big mainstream movie which is talking about the biggest issue of our time, and we have a duty to suspend critical objection. Digger certainly resonates with Donald Trump’s greedy urge to despoil the Arctic and everywhere else. Yet there is something glib and overblown here. This film finds itself in a postmodern hole. And what do you do when you’re in a hole?”
The London Evening Standard: “Tom Cruise is back with a bang in the Oscars ring in his best performance since 1999’s Magnolia … There are beautiful aftershocks to Iñárritu’s cinematic coup as this gallops towards a heartbreaking warning about where the real world is right now with fossil fuels and climate change … Audacious, risky, terrific fun and — for at least half the planet — the wildest ride you’ll get this year.”
The Austin Chronicle: “Ever heard that old saying, this meeting could have been an email? Similarly, rather than being a film, Digger could have been a burning bag of dog poop delivered to Adam McKay’s doorstep … A seeming broadside at heavy-handed Hollywood advocacy flops like Don’t Look Up, it’s a scathing pastiche of everything that makes such movies insufferably sanctimonious. Yet Birdman director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s obvious technical genius as a filmmaker cannot overcome the plain fact that Digger is both insufferable and sanctimonious.”
The Globe and Mail: “All these preening, obnoxiously self-satisfied moments, and so many more, add up to a movie so convinced of its own brilliance that it cannot see it is in fact the most banal variety of idiot: loud, ugly and forever oblivious to its own shortcomings …There is no overarching strategy to Digger, just endless scheming from a cinematic charlatan who should have been buried by Hollywood two or three movies ago.”
Slant: “…a film of ideas, a rambunctious gathering of mostly talented people doing the worst work of their careers … Digger is González Iñárritu’s purported cri de coeur against our wealth-and-resources-hoovering overlords, but somehow it still manages to be a shameless Tom Cruise ego stroke. The actor shrieks, preens, and postures. He spits bilious remarks at anyone in his line of sight, particularly during a gaseous monologue about mankind’s reliance on fossil fuels. And, of course, true to both Digger and the man playing him, everyone but himself is the problem … Digger’s teeth are about as sharp as a decades-old pair of dentures.”
Digger opens in theaters Oct. 2.
