Blah, blah and blah

 DIGGER (2026)

Endured by Jerry Saravia

The first major trailer for "Digger" was exciting and brash - a neo-political comedy on the order of Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove." It appeared as if it had its satirical claws sharpened for the politics of the Trump era, a finite, blackly comical treatise of the current maddening zeitgeist. We still need a movie like that now, something to cause the earth to tip on its axis and wake us up. Alas, "Digger" is not that movie. Without revealing much here that may dampen one's feelings of what this movie could have been, "Digger" is an incessant bore of a movie, a slow walk to nothingness. It has a remarkable ending but the rest of the movie has crumbles of a broken narrative. 

I will give props to Tom Cruise, an actor who has appeared in a diverse set of films until he decided to return to "Mission: Impossible" and "Top Gun" franchises. Nothing wrong with that but Cruise always seemed to contain an edgy veneer that went beyond good looks and natural charisma - he was always the poster boy for sincerity. Other than his best performance in "Born on the Fourth of July," he has played up insincerity and plumbed deep into those waters with "Magnolia" and "Eyes Wide Shut" (and let's not forget his hilarious turn in "Tropic Thunder.") In "Digger," he's a billionaire oil tycoon who cares more about his dying cat than the catastrophic drilling for oil in Greenland and Alaska with the approval and help of sickly, cancer-ridden President Compson (an emaciated John Goodman who is possibly the best thing about this movie). Apparently, due to methane warnings about drilling that this mega billionaire could barely give a lick about, an explosion in the icy terrain of Greenland has caused an ice shelf the size of Maryland to break away and result in major flooding in Europe. Later on, another floating ice shelf the size of Boston is ready to strike Alaska! What can be done about this flooding? Sadly not much except that Digger's own Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed, a balanced comical performance), an environmental safety chief, is on hand to speak to Parliament about the nitty-gritty truth of this disaster. Then Digger does his bit to speak to them about the real real truth - everyone wants oil and they want him to drill. Um, sure, that is a point to be made but not a very salient one.

I can't reveal too much about "Digger" and some of its surprises except that they do not add up to much. Its plot developments that enter the meta phase deter from the overall impact that I think director Alejandro Iñárritu was aiming for. The movie could have gone for broke and truly nailed the very zeitgeist we are in, to make the audience angry with serious commentary embellished by black humor. What we get is a sick cat, a one-note and wearying performance by Tom Cruise, and monotonous shaping of scenes that reiterate the same token phrases and ideas. As I mentioned before, "Digger" has a great ending but it belongs to a different, braver and more articulate movie.