Tom Cruise’s ‘Digger’ Gets Mixed Reviews, But Warner Leans In

Tom Cruise’s latest bid for Oscar glory may have hit a rough patch. Digger, his new dark satire with Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, has opened to mixed reviews and a 53% score on Rotten Tomatoes from 155 critics. In Digger, Cruise plays a wealthy oil tycoon under heavy makeup and prosthetics. The marketing leaned hard on his transformation, as if Hollywood voters were supposed to hand him a Best Actor trophy before audiences even saw the film. Critics, however, aren’t buying it across the board. “Endless speeches, most involving the horrors of Climate Change and how dern evil oil is. Cruise’s Digger gets an extended close-up where he rants, raves and reveals the truth about oil and culture,” warns Christian Toto, adding that “Digger is bloated, dull, obvious, utterly lacking in self-awareness and, yes, exhausting.” While Justin Change of The New Yorker called the film “a scream” concluding that “Iñárritu’s conceptually elaborate apocalyptic farce, hectoring satire and visual sublimity fight to a draw.” Moira MacDonald of The Seattle Times was mixed in her 2/5 review, insisting that the “time is right for a satire about climate change, but a satire should leave us a l...