Tom Cruise’s latest film, Digger, opened in theaters this week to a genuinely divided critical response, with reviewers broadly agreeing on the intensity and commitment of Cruise’s central performance while splitting sharply over whether director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ambitious satirical approach actually succeeds. The film casts Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an aging Texas oil tycoon navigating a catastrophe largely of his own making, in what marks Iñárritu’s first English-language film in more than a decade.
Critics have consistently highlighted Cruise’s go-for-broke commitment to the role, with reviewers describing a performance that pushes the typically controlled movie star into genuinely unfamiliar and eccentric territory. Several reviews specifically praised a stunning extended monologue late in the film, in which Cruise’s character simultaneously admits personal guilt while attempting to spread responsibility across society more broadly, as a particular highlight showcasing the range Cruise brings to this unusually theatrical role.
Despite this general consensus around Cruise’s performance, the film itself has generated notably polarized critical reaction regarding its broader satirical ambitions and execution. Some critics have praised the film’s audacious structure and willingness to disrupt its own narrative framework partway through, describing it as considerably more layered and complex than its opening act initially suggests, while other reviewers have dismissed the overall effort as bombastic, self-important, and ultimately lacking genuine comedic payoff despite its considerable visual and conceptual ambition.
The film’s screenplay, credited to Iñárritu alongside several collaborators including his longtime Birdman writing partners, attempts an urgent satirical message about humanity’s broader complicity in various forms of societal and environmental catastrophe, filtered through the specific lens of an larger-than-life fossil fuel industry figure. Some critics found this messaging genuinely sharp and cutting, drawing comparisons to classic satirical works, while others characterized the social commentary as muddled and ultimately undermined by the film’s own stylistic excesses.
Supporting performances from a notable ensemble cast, including Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller, and Emma D’Arcy, have generally received more consistently positive notices than the film overall, with several reviewers specifically praising how these performers help ground and occasionally counterbalance Cruise’s deliberately outsized central performance throughout the film’s two-hour-plus runtime.
Technical elements of the production, including its production design and overall visual craft, have drawn more universal praise across the range of otherwise divided reviews, with critics generally agreeing that the film’s ambitious visual approach represents a genuine technical achievement regardless of their broader feelings about the narrative and thematic execution surrounding that visual ambition.
As audiences begin forming their own opinions following this week’s theatrical release, Digger appears positioned to become one of the more genuinely debated major studio releases of the fall season, generating exactly the kind of passionate disagreement among both critics and audiences that often accompanies ambitious, formally unconventional filmmaking from a distinctive directorial voice working at this scale of production and star power.
