By: Lana Wilson-Combs
"DIGGER" IS ONE MISSION TOM CRUISE CAN'T SAVE
There is just no sugarcoating it.
"Digger," the latest movie from director
Alejandro G. Inarritu ("Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths") and starring
Tom Cruise ("Mission: Impossible--The Final Reckoning"), who also serves as co-producer, is an overstuffed, pretentious, meandering mess of a movie. It's pretty awful.
While it's easy to appreciate Cruise for branching out beyond his action-star realm and swinging for the fences, he strikes out here playing a fat-suit-and-prosthetic-wearing Texas oil tycoon named Digger Rockwell. He lives in a mansion, loves his dying (fake) cat, and at times turns to his half-sister and business partner Emma (an underused Sandra Huller, "Project Hail Mary") for advice.
Cruise's shtick wears thin mighty quickly, and the novelty of watching him buried beneath all that makeup and padding disappears long before the movie does. I wish the film had spent as much time developing its story as it did creating Digger's appearance. The basic premise has some possibilities: the most powerful man in the world races to prove he is humanity's savior before he and his company causes a potential world-ending disaster in Greenland.
Unfortunately, instead of giving us a gripping race against the clock, "Digger" piles on political commentary, environmental messaging and increasingly loud and combative confrontations until the whole thing becomes downright exhausting. The movie isn't exactly subtle about what it wants you to think, and after a while, the preaching becomes as relentless as the shouting.
Adding to the madness and hoping to solve this spiraling crisis, is the dictator president of the United States (John Goodman, TV's "The Freak Brothers"), Vice President Eddie (Michael Stuhlbarg, "After the Hunt" and "The Amateur"), Dr. Nirav Ganesh, (Riz Ahmed, TV's "Bait" and "Relay"), a scientist and Digger's head of environmental safety, along with a maniacal military leader (Robert John Burke, TV's "The Last of Us").
What's odd, too, is that Inarritu is a filmmaker who has certainly demonstrated that he knows how to make ambitious movies. However, with "Digger," he seems unsure what to do with all this material. There's a twist about a half-hour in, followed by even more chaos, exposition, and characters racing around trying to make sense of a crisis that the audience has already been struggling to care about.
And then comes another twist involving a stage production headed up by Digger's nephew (Jesse Plemons, "The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping"). Discovering exactly how it fits into the story is one of the few surprises left for anyone brave enough to stick around for it. It's an interesting idea, but by this point, the movie has already asked the audience to endure too much.
"Digger" is one of those movies where you can see the ambition, appreciate the craftsmanship, and even admire the sheer amount of work that went into creating it, and still wonder how everybody involved managed to miss the target so badly.
"Digger" never finds the right rhythm, even as it desperately tries to convince you it's important. It's not.
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Watch This Trailer For
"DIGGER"
Lana K. Wilson-Combs is a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association (BFCA), The American Film Institute (AFI), and a Nominating Committee Voting Member for the NAACP Image Awards.
