Critics Split Dead Even on Iñárritu's 'Digger'

First reviews of Tom Cruise's climate satire 'Digger' land at a near-exact 50 percent Rotten Tomatoes split, with critics calling it both a triumph and a disaster.

Iñárritu's 'Digger,' and the Hollywood Reporter reports that first reactions are 'brutally split.' Right out of the gate on Rotten Tomatoes, the Warner Bros. film is hovering around a dead-even 50 percent score. The positive notices carry strong superlatives — the London Evening Standard calls it 'audacious, risky, terrific fun' — while the negative ones are scathing, with the Boston Globe branding it 'the worst movie of Tom Cruise's career.' The film, in which a nearly unrecognizable Cruise plays an oil tycoon whose Greenland drilling dislodges a catastrophic ice shelf, opens in theaters October 2.

The Hollywood Reporter's own review calls it 'a climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic it makes Adam McKay's Don't Look Up seem almost innocuous,' and says it is 'difficult to imagine mainstream audiences ever wanting' the 'bludgeoning ordeal.' IndieWire's critic likens it to 'a hat on a hat on a hat,' noting its most believable character is a one-eyed animatronic cat named Maggie. According to the New York Post, it is Cruise's 'first real stinker in nearly 10 years.' The Globe and Mail says the film is 'loud, ugly and forever oblivious to its own shortcomings,' and The Wrap jokes it is 'what happens when you give the week's worst Saturday Night Live sketch an inexplicably large budget.'

The same day produced genuinely glowing notices. The London Evening Standard hails Cruise's 'best performance since 1999's Magnolia' and 'the wildest ride you'll get this year.' Deadline's reviewer sees 'a return to the kind of adventurous films in cinema's groundbreaking era of the 1970s' and calls Iñárritu 'one of the most original and fascinating filmmakers working today,' praising Cruise's 'stunning 10-minute monologue.' The BBC's critic admits 'personally, I loved it,' predicting most people will skip it or walk out, but defending it as no failure. The Guardian found it 'exasperatingly shallow' yet conceded there are 'moments to enjoy' in Cruise's 'boisterous leading turn.'

The Los Angeles Times' Amy Nicholson frames the film as 'a bizarre stunt made on a big studio budget, a climate change satire that's a self-conscious hybrid of Stanley Kubrick and Bertolt Brecht,' revealing mid-film that the story is actually a stage play within the film called 'Fossil Fools.' That meta twist divides critics sharply: The Guardian says it is 'presented as a fait accompli twist' that undermines investment, while the LA Times was 'giddy that it's lurched into existence.' Empire, per the Hollywood Reporter roundup, finds the film 'more concerned with itself than with the audience' but still credits Cruise with 'a win' and Lubezki's cinematography with 'Kubrickian grandeur.'

The division carries real consequences. USA Today suggests, according to the Hollywood Reporter roundup, that divisiveness 'could keep a deserving Cruise out of an ultra-competitive Oscar race,' while the Evening Standard puts him 'back with a bang in the Oscars ring.' The LA Times notes even celebrated 21st-century satires like 'Idiocracy' and 'Sorry to Bother You' initially stumbled at the box office, and compares the film's bleakness to 'Don't Look Up.' With a $125-million budget reported by the Los Angeles Times and a wide theatrical opening on October 2, the film's fate now rests on whether audiences side with the BBC's grinning enthusiast or the Post's urgently departing viewer.