Tom Cruise in a scene from 'Digger.' Warner Bros. Pictures
Alejandro G. Iñárritu wants to bludgeon you with "Digger." There is really no other way to put it.
The movie comes at you already yelling. Then it gets louder.
The Mexican filmmaker has never been one particularly interested in restraint, but "Digger" pushes that instinct into overdrive. The camera lunges, the characters explode, the world seems to be coming apart at the seams, and every scene feels like it has been told that the previous scene was not quite insane enough.
I spent a good chunk of the movie thinking, Jesus Christ, man, we get it.
And then Tom Cruise shows up looking like he has been inflated by a mad scientist.
Cruise plays a grotesquely wealthy industrialist, a titan of industry with the temperament of a spoiled child and the self-regard of a man who has spent his entire life being told that the rules are for other people. The prosthetics are heavy, the voice is ridiculous, and Cruise leans into the whole thing with the kind of commitment that can only come from a movie star who has decided he might as well set fire to his own image.
He is having fun. A lot of fun.
You can see it in the way he stretches the character's theatrical drawl, in the petulant little eruptions of rage, in the way he carries himself as if every person in the room exists primarily to serve him. Cruise has always been a remarkably controlled performer. Here, he plays a man who has absolutely no control over himself.
That is funny.
It is also the most interesting thing about the performance.
There is something deliciously ugly about watching one of the world's most famous leading men play a man whose entire personality has curdled around his own importance. The character is a walking monument to male vanity. He has money, power, status, an enormous sense of entitlement, and apparently no idea what to do with any of it except demand more.
A scene from 'Digger.' Warner Bros. Pictures
Cruise understands the joke. The problem is that "Digger" keeps explaining the joke long after Cruise has already landed it.
This is where Iñárritu loses me.
The man can direct the hell out of a movie. There are images here that are enormous and apocalyptic and, at times, genuinely breathtaking. He has an instinct for scale that is almost absurd. He wants the frame to feel like it is about to split open.
But every time I started to settle into one of those images, the movie would throw something else at me. More noise. More movement. More screaming. More destruction. More meaning.
Eventually, all that maximalism starts working against itself. If everything is presented as the biggest possible moment, then nothing gets to be the biggest moment.
That was my experience of "Digger": I was constantly looking at things without necessarily feeling them.
There is a difference.
The movie clearly wants to tear into wealth, industrial power, masculine ego, celebrity, and entitlement.
I'm with it on the anger. I'm less convinced by how it handles that anger.
The movie seems to believe that if it keeps turning up the volume, eventually the satire will become profound. Sometimes it does. More often, it just becomes louder.
Iñárritu does not exactly deviate from his instinct to escalate. The movie keeps reaching for the next mountain, the next explosion, the next visual freak-out, as if stillness would somehow constitute failure.
The second half is where I really started to feel the movie's architecture.
The meta-fictional framing device, with all its internal play and production business, should theoretically add another dimension. Instead, it kept pulling me out. Just when the story might have allowed itself to become strange or emotionally ugly on its own terms, the movie would remind me that I was watching a construction.
I could see the gears. And once you see the gears, good luck pretending you don't.
A scene from 'Digger.' Warner Bros. Pictures
The device becomes particularly cumbersome as the movie moves along. It feels like the film is trying to hold two different ideas in its head at once: the giant, chaotic nightmare unfolding in front of us and the intellectual game being played around it.
One is visceral. The other is fussy. The fussy one keeps getting in the way of the visceral one. It starts feeling abstruse in places where it should simply be devastating.
I wanted the movie to trust its own ugliness. Instead, it kept explaining the ugliness to me.
That's a shame, because a genuinely nasty idea lurks underneath all of this. The industrialist is so consumed by his own mythology that he has practically evolved backward. At one point, I found myself thinking that this man wasn't a titan at all but some bizarre Australopithecus of wealth, stomping around with the primitive conviction that having power means everyone else must obey.
That made me laugh.
It also made me realize how much more fun the movie is when it stops trying to sound important.
Cruise is funniest when he is simply being an asshole. Not a symbol. Not a metaphor. Not the embodiment of late-stage civilization. Just an asshole.
Give him a room, a grievance, and somebody who won't immediately agree with him, and the performance comes alive. You can feel Cruise enjoying the freedom to be ugly and ridiculous. He is not asking to be liked. He barely seems interested in being understood.
But the movie keeps reaching for something grander. It wants this man's tantrums to mean something about all of us.
Maybe they do. I just wish the movie had given me more reason to care.
This is the strange contradiction of "Digger." It is visually enormous and emotionally weirdly small.
The apocalypse is everywhere. The human connection isn't.
I kept waiting for the movie to get under my skin instead of simply getting in my face.
There is a difference between being overwhelmed and being moved. Iñárritu knows how to overwhelm. Nobody can accuse him of making a timid movie. But the more "Digger" piles on, the more I found myself watching vicariously, as if I had been moved several rows back from the action and was now observing the whole thing through glass.
That's not where I wanted to be.
I wanted to feel trapped inside this nightmare.
Instead, I often felt like I was watching somebody else's very expensive nervous breakdown.
The visual work is almost impossible to dismiss. Craft is everywhere. The sets, the camera movement, the scale of the destruction, and the sheer density of the filmmaking are all impressive. None of it looks cheap or careless. Iñárritu clearly knows how to make a movie feel physically enormous.
But craft can become its own kind of camouflage.
You can hide a surprisingly hollow center underneath enough spectacle.
And "Digger" hides a lot.
Sometimes I wondered if I was supposed to be impressed by how much was happening or moved by what any of it meant. The answer seemed to change from scene to scene.
At times, the movie nearly gets there. Cruise's character is such a magnificent bastard that you can see the outline of a vicious satire about men who have accumulated so much power that they can no longer distinguish desire from entitlement.
Then the movie starts screaming again.
It is like somebody keeps walking into the room while you're having an interesting conversation and setting off a firecracker.
Eventually you stop listening.
A scene from 'Digger.' Warner Bros. Pictures
The problem isn't that the movie is ambitious. Iñárritu clearly has a lot on his mind. The problem is that almost every idea arrives dressed as a grand statement.
Even Cruise's performance, for all its bravura, eventually feels swallowed by the spectacle. The prosthetics, the voice, the physicality, the absurdity of the whole thing are so aggressively presented that the character starts becoming a cartoon before he has a chance to become tragic.
Maybe tragedy isn't the point. Maybe the joke is simply that this enormous man is ridiculous. If so, I wish the movie had trusted that joke.
Cruise does. Iñárritu doesn't.
The result is a movie that seems to confuse fury with insight. The anger is obvious. The problem is what the movie thinks that anger accomplishes.
Fine. But fury isn't automatically intelligence. Sometimes it is just fury. And there is a lot of it here.
By the final stretch, I wasn't asking what the movie was trying to say anymore. I was asking when it would stop saying it.
That's probably the cruelest thing I can say about "Digger," because I don't think the movie is stupid. Far from it. I think it is almost painfully aware of what it wants to be doing.
It just can't leave well enough alone. Every idea gets inflated. Everything is emblazoned across the screen until the screen itself starts to feel exhausted.
Maybe that's what Iñárritu is going for. Maybe the movie wants us to drown in the same excess it is criticizing. I just don't think drowning automatically makes the water deeper.
Iñárritu has made a massive movie about massive appetites, massive egos, massive destruction, and the ridiculous men who believe the world exists for them.
There is something satisfying about watching Cruise tear into that kind of character. There are some extraordinary images. There are also stretches that made me want to crawl out of my seat.
"Digger" felt less like a carefully aimed piece of satire and more like a filmmaker having an enormous tantrum about other people's enormous tantrums.
It swings hard. It swings wildly. And I respect the swing. But the movie seems to think that the harder it swings, the more profound the impact. It isn't.
Sometimes a tantrum is just a tantrum, no matter how much money you spend filming it.