Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Starring: Tom Cruise, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D'Arcy, Michael Stuhlbarg
There's been much talk recently regarding whether AI will ever replace human filmmakers. Can a piece of art be made by something without a soul? I mistakenly believed AI to be an initialism of "Artificial Intelligence," but having watched Digger I now understand that it actually refers to Alejandro Iñárritu. On the evidence of Digger, I have no worries that AI will ever replace human filmmakers.
Iñárritu has somehow convinced our last surviving movie star to join him in this abominable venture. Sporting heavy make-up and a fat suit, Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, the world's richest oil man. When one of Digger's drilling sites in the Arctic leads to a breakaway iceberg the size of Washington DC on an imminent collision course with Western Europe, Digger is summoned by the President (John Goodman), who demands that since he created this mess, he should be the one to fix it.
Digger resembles a Spitting Image sketch that has been stretched past two hours, humans in bad make-up replacing the puppets. It's liberal satire at its laziest, a rehash of every Trump gag cracked by late night talk show hosts over the past 10 years (though Goodman's President appears more Reagan-coded; for one thing he's married to a woman his own age). The performances are pitched to 11 in a deathly unfunny riff on Dr. Strangelove while the production design and framing bring to mind all those awful AI videos parodying the perceived style of Wes Anderson.
[Possible spoilers ahead] But here's the twist: Digger looks comically artificial because it's revealed that we're actually watching a massive theatrical production of "Fossil Fools," a play based on real events that occurred several decades earlier. Cruise is actually Curtis Markson, the actor portraying Digger. The backstage drama sees Curtis argue with his director (Sophie Wilde) over the merits of satirising this apocalyptic event, while trying to find out if his daughter's flight made it safely through one of the many storms that now ravage the planet. But Cruise just isn't the right actor to pull this role off. I'm not sure anyone could, but it would require a proper ham like Eric Roberts or Nicolas Cage to make it anyway entertaining.
"You fools thought I was making a bad satire," Iñárritu laughs in our faces, "Well I'm parodying bad satire." That's all well and good Senor Iñárritu, but a bad movie is a bad movie regardless of the intention, and given that the intentionally bad play within the unintentionally bad film takes up about 90% of Digger's runtime... well, that's an awful lot of bad satire for an audience to endure.
I can't get my head around what Iñárritu hoped to achieve with this misguided mess. How does he think it's a good idea to force an audience to sit through a purposely atrocious narrative just to make some clunky point about how he feels satire is pointless? The central point is made within the first 30 minutes, but the movie is over two hours long, and it is the most torturous experience I've had in a cinema in years. I looked at my watch more times than a gym teacher on sports day, and every time it seemed like the end credits were somehow further away. Digger is like one of those cruel experiments the CIA conducted on unwitting guinea pigs to see if they could break a man's spirit. It broke mine. I began to question my mortality, and the choices in my life that had led to me sitting in a cinema watching Digger while elsewhere in the world people were making love, enjoying great meals, hearing Soft Cell's Tainted Love transition into Where Did Our Love Go for the first time, all while yours truly is stuck watching a maniacal Mexican force Tom Cruise to commit his most embarrassing act since he leapt onto Oprah's couch. There are people who only go to the movies once a year, and the presence of Cruise means Digger may well be that one movie for 2026. Such people may never return to the cinema.
Digger is in UK/ROI cinemas from October 2nd.
