I was looking forward to Tom Cruise finally getting off the Hollywood action blockbuster treadmill and back into some headier acting again when Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger was first teased. Then I saw the actual trailer and was immediately turned off. It felt pitched purely as a vehicle for Cruise’s prosthetic-fueled stunt acting. Then I watched it in theaters this week and was blown away. I loved it. What an incredible movie. I have no idea why the critics hate it so much.
Digger has been called “the most divisive movie of 2026,” “a hate letter to life, cinema, art, and its own audience,” and even the “worst movie of Tom Cruise’s career.” Knowing about the 50-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of time, and the broader Dr. Strangelove vibes swirling around conversations about the movie, I went in expecting, at best, a daring and entertaining mess. I did not expect Digger to be as incredibly watchable, straightforwardly entertaining, and yet also cerebrally satisfying, as it ended up being.
The movie is about an oil man named Digger Rockwell, a larger-than-life figure who is loaded with so many past-their-sell-by-date tropes about post-9/11 American cowboy manifest destiny drill-baby-drill-type antics that the parody would fall flat if not for the 110-percent commitment and innate camera-mugging charm of Hollywood’s number-one leading man. His reckless resource-extraction efforts in Greenland have broken off a chunk of glacier the size of Philadelphia and sent it hurtling toward the coastline of Northern Europe, where it will initiate the largest environmental disaster in recorded history.
I could tell you where things go from there but the details are quite meaningless and without knowing the secret twist that frames the rest of the movie, which I will not spoil for you here, the particulars of the rest of the plot and how they function in concert with Digger‘s broader themes aren’t worth discussing. The performances, including Riz Ahmed as environmental safety expert Dr. Nirav Ganesh and John Goodman as U.S. President Compton, are exceptional, and achieve exactly what’s required of Iñárritu’s larger mission. The craft around the rest of the movie’s making are equally impressive. There are some scene transitions that I will never forget, and one monologue in particular, when Digger is called to account for his sins, that is completely ridiculous and utterly transfixing.
How best to describe a thing I can’t tell you about? Imagine jamming the biggest movie star around into a Bertolt Brecht play staged by a version of Wes Anderson who hates quiet, understated subtlety. If there’s one hang-up I can foresee for most people, it’s the way the movie handles comedy. Good movies are very good at making audiences feel like they’re laughing with a movie. The joke is funnier because we are in on it. We, as moviegoers, are often trained to see laughing at a movie as a sign of failure, that something along the way between artistic intention and final result broke down, and even if it accidentally creates entertainment in the process, it is not a virtue to be applauded in its own right. Iñárritu dispenses with these sorts of directorial handshakes for his latest parody.
I laughed a lot at Digger the way I have laughed a lot at clips of absurd political moments over the years. This includes everything from Daily Show roundups to random moments in brutal documentaries about truly horrible things, because sometimes when something so bad it put so plainly and life just carries on as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened, it is my natural inclination to cackle. I apologize to the rest of my mostly empty AMC showing at how loudly and often this happened during Digger.
There is nothing very new, original, or revelatory in Digger about anything in the real world, but it is often rendered with such shameless garishness that it goes from feeling boring and preachy to being as irresistible to watch as a high-octane WWE event. It is not a traditional prestige cinema experience in that way, where the audience can feel an invisible impresario effortlessly whisking them away from one emotional beat to the next. The movie is ridiculous. It includes many ridiculous artistic choices. And in the end I couldn’t believe how well they all worked.
