As we swim into the final actor 2026, I was worried we weren’t going to get a truly divisive film for us to gnash our teeth before the year’s end. Thankfully, the always challenging Alejandro Iñárritu has come through with the goods with the flamboyant and chaotic Digger.
Oilman Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) comes from a long line of earth breakers. There are only two loves in his life – money and his decrepit cat Maggie. An individual who has no qualms as to how he expands his wealth, Digger’s respect for mother nature extends about as far as the untrimmed pinky finger he uses to feed his rotting feline. That is, until work conducted by his company cause a gigantic block of ice to go floating towards Europe, threatening the lives of millions. Now a man wrestling with a soon-to-be shredded legacy, Digger digs himself further into a spiralling mess of narrative mangling and climate catastrophe all while convincing himself that it’s “just good business”.
Breathless, exhaustive and bone shattering, Tom Cruise is channelling the energy he used to sprint across our screens in Mission Impossible into flipping the European Parliament the bird. Digger is the personification of the carnage created if T.J. Mackey and Les Grossman got into a bar fight. A marvel to watch and mesmerising in his buffoonery, Cruise is acting as if he won’t see tomorrow morning, and he might not if he keeps all that screaming and hyperventilating up. At some point, the action star was going to pivot back into meaty acting roles, so why not kick that door down with someone like Rockwell?
It’s easy to say that this is Iñárritu’s Dr. Strangelove but really it’s Birdman through the prism of early Coen Bros. Think the energy of Raising Arizona with a climate apocalypse looming overhead and you’re just about there. Iñárritu is a master storyteller, willing to go places few dare. Much like contemporaries, Cuarón and Del Toro, Iñárritu is all too happy to push buttons and the limits of what an audience can handle, and he’s also more than jovial to burn through the cinema capital that the banked with the one-two punch of Birdman and The Revenant. And, much like his leading man, he’s directing as if tomorrow never comes, because who’s ever satisfied with playing it safe?
I won’t pretend that there isn’t merit in some of the criticisms of Digger. Smug, cynical, hollow – I can make a case for all of these sins committed, but only if taken at face value. On the surface it has the air of a film made by the smarmy “liberal elites” seeking to talk down and wag fingers. And should you feel that way, you might be missing the point. Iñárritu isn’t so much seeking to talk down as he is highlighting the impasse we currently find ourselves in socially and politically. How does one satirise the irony-deficient, when farce and ridicule can only do so much in the face of those with no shame gag reflex. Our current climate finds us in the most ridiculous and frightening of situations with no immediate reprieve, and possibly more shit shovelling around the corner. So, it only makes sense to, rather than rely on satire alone, when it’s been done better in the past, peel back the layers of this reality we find ourselves and interrogate as to where we go from here.
Digger is going to annoy, it’s going to piss off and it’s going to agitate, but it will also elate, energise and awe inspire. Already, I’ve had many a back and forth with fellow writers and critics who would either spit on the grave of this film or sing its praises to whoever will listen. I sit very much in the latter camp, awe struck by the audacity of Iñárritu, Cruise and their collaborators, all equally on board and very much on the same audacious creative train. In an environment where everything has become noise, and only the loudest break through, I can only hope that Digger screeches to the top and starts a couple of verbal fistfights in its wake. We deserve art that slaps us around, and Digger is very much swinging.
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