Tom Cruise’s Digger was never going to be an easy sell. Partly because it’s a metatextual, finger-wagging climate farce that disguises its leading man beneath prosthetic make-up and a fake beer belly. Partly, too, because it’s absolutely atrocious. Full of didactic monologues, jokes that don’t land, incredibly skilled supporting actors doing career-worst work, and a tone that veers between smug posturing and performative indifference (early in development it was quite literally titled Blah Blah Blah), Alejandro G Iñárritu’s new film is practically repellent by design. Still, Warner Bros seemed to curse their own movie by selling it to audiences via the most puzzlingly aloof promotional campaign in recent memory. “Dead on arrival” seems too kind a description for what went down here.
Digger is – at first, anyway – the story of Digger Rockwell, a neanderthal Texan oil magnate who has ignored warnings about the security of his Antarctic pipelines and is now weathering the consequences. Namely that an ice shelf has detached and will imminently collide with Europe. Cruise plays Digger like a Taylor Sheridan character with a head injury, a man who loves a penis size analogy and whose best friend is a decrepit, animatronic cat. An unusually awful John Goodman is the American president, stricken with what he repeatedly terms “ass cancer”, and an unusually awful Sandra Hüller is Digger’s nihilistic deadpan sister.
