Tom Cruise has built his long and wildly successful career as an A-list movie star on his irrefutable charisma, incredible stunt-work capabilities, and a refusal to age. From early dramas like Top Gun, A Few Good Men, and Jerry Maguire, he defined the American hero, fighting the good fight in the face of death, failure, and a bellowing Jack Nicholson. Across Mission: Impossible movies, he created a brand that would define his legacy as an unstoppable force at the box office worldwide. But one honor he hasn’t yet earned is an Academy Award.
Make no mistake. He’s been nominated for an acting Oscar three times — twice for Best Actor (Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire) and once for Best Supporting Actor (Magnolia). (That he was snubbed completely for Interview with the Vampire is an outrage that still echoes across the decades.) And while the Academy gave him an Honorary Award in 2026, Digger feels intensely as if it’s Cruise’s big swing to win at last. And I cannot imagine Iñárritu’s latest will earn Cruise Oscar gold.
On paper, it could. Iñárritu’s Biutiful, Birdman, and The Revenant led to Academy Award nominations for Javier Bardem and Michael Keaton, and a win for Leonardo DiCaprio. However, his last film, Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, received less praise and only an Oscar nod for cinematography. And Digger, despite its energetic promotional campaign, has more in common with Bardo than Birdman in terms of the director’s indulgences.
Tom Cruise plays way against type in Digger.
Credit: Seoju Park / Warner Bros. Entertainment
To his credit, Cruise bounds out of his comfort zone in this role. His signature swagger and good looks are caked in head-to-toe prosthetics that make him look older, fatter, and balding. And to the credit of the hair, make-up, and visual effects team, the transformation is seamless. Reminiscent of his makeover as a surly producer in the showbiz satire Tropic Thunder, Cruise doesn’t hold back in playing an American titan who is also a raging asshole.
Digger Rockwell is an oil magnate who has earned unimaginable wealth and privilege through drilling. But when one of his sites in Greenland causes an ecological disaster that could have massive fallout, he’s thrown into damage control with his green-energy-pushing sister Emma (Sandra Hüller), an ornery American president (John Goodman), a high-strung scientist (Riz Ahmed), and a barrage of wide-eyed yes-men played by celebrated character actors including Michael Stuhlbarg and Burn Gorman.
Like Adam McKay’s 2021 satire Don’t Look Up, Digger becomes a satire about climate change, studded with famous faces, including Emma D’Arcy as a put-upon assistant and Jesse Plemons as a Digger admirer. Unfortunately, also like Don’t Look Up, Digger thinks itself wildly clever, when it’s really a preachy lecture with splashy cinema spectacle. Far from an effective argument about the graveness of our current situation, it plays as a finger-wagging scold of the common man for presumed apathy, while the film is doggedly not about the common man, but about the 1% who trades in the future of the planet for financial success now.
However, even if the snag of snarling politics doesn’t put off Academy voters, Cruise’s attempts at comedy might. It’s not that Cruise can’t be funny. Again, look to Tropic Thunder, Interview with the Vampire, Risky Business, and even Rain Man. It’s that Digger is astonishingly unfunny. It’s a farce without jokes, save fart jokes. The screenplay — which lists a handful of screenwriters, including Iñárritu — achieves absurdity, but rarely laughs. For instance, the film begins with Digger caring for his very, very close-to-death cat Maggie, who is less an animal and more a body-horror puppet of festering wounds, clumpy fur, and a facial expression that meows, “Kill me.” The prolonged attention Digger gives this cat as she defecates on his bed, his silk pajamas, and anything else he sets her near, is probably intended to be funny. But it’s bizarre, as if the whimsy of Wes Anderson had rotted into a grotesque mockery or the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove were smothered in scatological humor.
Tom Cruise is outshone by Digger‘s ensemble.
Credit: Seoju Park / Warner Bros. Entertainment
Aside from Digger being preachy, gross, and annoying in its cynicism, it’s also afflicted by putting a leading man in a character actor role. Yes, Digger is the lead. Yes, Cruise slides into a thick Texan accent as earnestly as he does the prosthetics. But the churlishness that’s meant to be both revolting and compelling in this clownish carnage machine rings false. It’s hard to watch this and not imagine what Paul Giamatti or Stephen Root or even co-stars Goodman or Stuhlbarg might have done with such a role.
In their bit parts, they are more engaging than Cruise manages to be. Goodman is in his comfort zone, hollering wrath and vengeance as he has in a slew of terrific Coen Bros movies. Stuhlbarg, who can break your heart with one monologue (as he did in Call Me by Your Name), brings subtle humor as a feckless vice president. Hüller is explosive as the only family member who can outshout Digger. Plemons is satisfyingly creepy, while D’Arcy brings screen presence and nuance to a barely written role. But Ahmed is outstanding.
Perhaps no surprise as the British Pakistani actor has a fine ear for satire, as shown in Four Lions and Nightcrawler. Ahmed doesn’t go too big, instead grounding Cruise’s showy performance with his sturdy, silent disdain. When his Dr. Ganesh finally has a moment to deliver a monologue of his own, it’s both funny, heartbreaking, and an excellent example of acting drunk. If there’s an acting nom coming for Digger, my money would be on Ahmed (who was previously nominated in 2021 for his superb performance in Sound of Metal).
Of course, there will be Cruise defenders who will argue the too-muchness of his Digger is exactly the point. Iñárritu’s film tries to lampshade its own outrageousness with layers of jolting reveals that urge the audience to reconsider much of what they’ve seen. But Digger‘s convoluted construction ultimately mocks an art form that other contenders this season celebrate. It’s a movie that works hard to be clever, and in doing so, loses sight of being interesting, entertaining, or even challenging. It just becomes a barrage of ideas, and monologues, and plot twists that try the audience’s patience while chiding them for their presumed apathy.
Credit: Seoju Park / Warner Bros. Entertainment
In the end, Digger will certainly bewilder and will likely prove polarizing. The one place where I suspect Digger‘s detractors and fans will agree is that its sound design and production design are incredible.
In the sound design, Maximilian Behrens brings an eerie heightened humor into a war room scenario, where the sound of yes-men turning their chairs is full of the creaks of wood and the squeaks of metal. In a pivotal moment of human history, these men are so silent that the sounds of their luxurious setting echo loudly; it’s a scathing and comedic condemnation. Later, the sound of eating sushi plays as a squishy reminder of mankind’s recklessly ravenous domination of the planet.
Production designer Dennis Gassner creates a world around Digger that is preposterously bedecked in signs of wealth and excess that also echo this theme. Taxidermied animals line not only his walls, but also his ceilings. His boots aren’t leather but snakeskin, or perhaps something more exotic. His chosen paintings are of a lion mauling its prey. All of these keenly build the story of Digger Rockwell.
This makes Digger so frustrating. Iñárritu clearly had a big budget to work with, and he used it toward a dazzling production design and assembling an incredible cast. But this revered director led his movie star astray in a self-indulgent, ugly, and cynical parable that’s sure to irritate rather than educate, entertain, or ignite change. And actually, that might have been Iñárritu’s point all along. And damn, I’d hate if that’s the world we live in, where even one of the most celebrated living directors thinks art is useless in effecting change.