DIGGER

PREMISE

The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.

THE GOOD STUFF

TOMMY CRUISE- Hard as it is to believe, there are people who are young enough to only know Tom Cruise as an action star. Rightfully so. Look at his resume post-2005, and that’s exactly what he was/is. He’s been doing action movies for so long that I sometimes have to remind myself that this is the same guy who got three Oscar nominations for JERRY MAGUIRE, MAGNOLIA, and BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY. Tom Cruise is an absolute beast when the right director gives him the right material to be beastly. Well, Alejandro González Iñárritu is that kind of director, and this is an absolutely beastly performance.

There is a scene in which his character, Digger, addresses the European Parliament with a 10-minute uncut monologue that is all fire and brimstone in a way that Cruise has not been since MAGNOLIA in 1999. It is one of the very best singular moments in his career…and that is saying something. He’s had a lot of moments that have been pretty definitive of film history. That should be one of them.

THE CURVEBALL- Hey, did you know that Alejandro González Iñárritu is a big, big fan of surrealism? I can understand watching his “Trilogy of Death” (BABEL, AMORES PERROS, and 21 GRAMS) and coming away thinking that his wheelhouse is heavy-as-hell, almost grimy character pieces like those movies. I understand.

But to be fair, the “Trilogy of Death” ended in 2006. And since then, he’s made the films BIUTIFUL, BIRDMAN, THE REVENANT, BARDO, and this. All of those films deal with something called magical surrealism. THE REVENANT and BIUTIFUL have multiple dream sequences that are completely jarring next to the rest of the film. BARDO and BIRDMAN have complete tonal changes to the structure of the story, and magical surrealism comes in really heavy there.

I mention all of this because that is the wheelhouse. Surrealism. If you haven’t seen this movie and you’ve heard a lot about what the “twist” is, please understand the director we’re dealing with here. What happens in this movie is not unusual for this director. At all.

RIZ AHMED- As much credit as Cruise gets for this performance, and as much awards consideration as he’s rightfully getting, we should also acknowledge what Riz Ahmed does in this film. He is the yin to basically every other character’s yang in this movie. Of all the military and oil people who are directly responsible for the catastrophes that take place in this film, he is the singular character expressing the mental and physical toll from all the guilt that he feels.

Because of the way that this story is structured, every character in this film is playing this sort of DR. STRANGELOVE-ish eccentricity, except him. He is the human voice. It’s a really heartbreaking performance that gets buried underneath all of the other madness that this film has to bring.

JOHN GOODMAN- A question: is there some reason why we do not consider John Goodman one of the icons of modern American comedy? When you look back on it, comedy makes up the majority of this man’s resume, both on TV and in film. He’s done a lot more classic things than we’ve ever really paid attention to. To some, the kind of breakneck-speed comedic intensity that he’s bringing to this film seems unexpected, and I don’t know why. At 75 years of age, this man still has this kind of slapstick comedic energy to bring to a performance like this. It’s admirable and worth mentioning. This man is an icon.

THE BAD STUFF

SANDRA HÜLLER USAGE- I’m not saying that Hüller isn’t good in this movie for what she gets the chance to do. I’m not crazy. I… just don’t know what she does here. I don’t know what the importance of her character is to the story. Literally everything involving this character could be cut from this movie, and nothing would change. There are two other female roles in this film, played by Sophie Wilde and Annabel Mullion, whose characters are way more essential to the plot than Digger’s wife. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about them in detail, because even mentioning what those characters are… is spoiler territory.

THE OVERALL SOUND- The film score of this movie has to be jarring by design. Every element of music in this film is designed either to make you feel uncomfortable or to distinctively contrast the horrible or horrific things that are on screen. The score by Cosmo Sheldrake is both delightful and eerie at times when it doesn’t need to be eerie. There are sound effects consistently being played in the background of a lot of scenes in this movie that may be irritating to sit through.

There is a particular scene, for example, where you’re consistently hearing drops of water in a bucket, which is so annoying to endure, but the scene it’s taking place in is an excellent exchange between the Riz Ahmed and Tom Cruise characters. Given the context of that conversation, it symbolically makes sense to have the water bucket there, but I don’t know why we need to consistently hear the water throughout the scene. Ugh.

THE UGLY STUFF

THE ADVERTISING- On December 18th of 2025, there was a teaser trailer for this movie that suggested that Tom Cruise was going to go into some TROPIC THUNDER/Les Grossman-type comedic territory. The teaser had Tom Cruise dancing to a Gorillaz song. The tagline for the movie is “a COMEDY of catastrophic proportions.” Nobody involved with the film came out and said that the movie was going to be anything but what the trailer was advertising UP UNTIL THE FILM’S RELEASE. None of the trailers indicated what any of these massive twists were going to be either, and I know that was by design.

That being said, it is with no hyperbole whatsoever that I say this film may be the most falsely advertised film of my lifetime.

I’m not at all saying that the false advertisements take away from the cinematic experience itself. It’s not going to be for everybody. It is selling itself as something that can appeal to a wide demographic, and it most definitely does not do that.

This is one of the 10 best Tom Cruise performances ever, if nothing else. It’s beautiful to look at, it has a wonderful supporting cast and a brilliant political message, and it pretty much does everything well that great movies are supposed to get right….

DIGGER is the combined effort of some of Hollywood’s very best talent. If you are open to seeing cinema that’s challenging and thought-provoking, once you see it, it will not disappoint. But if you’re reading this and you only have the trailers as a reference point for what you’re about to see… then you are going in blind. What you’re going to see is perhaps the most nihilistic movie of 2026, and it may upset you a little bit for the ticket that you paid for.

DIGGER is in theaters now