Tom Cruise's 'Digger' Splits Critics, but Few of Them Blame Cruise

Most of the 14 early reviews we sorted pan Alejandro G. Iñárritu's climate satire, but only two go after Cruise's oil-tycoon turn.

Tom Cruise's “Digger” drew a perfect score and a half-point pan, and most of the pans went after the movie, not its star.

The London Evening Standard gave Alejandro G. Iñárritu's climate satire 5 out of 5. Slant gave it half a point out of 5. Both sit in a roundup of 14 critics that The Hollywood Reporter published on Sept. 29. The roundup also found the Warner Bros. release sitting near an even 50-50 split on Rotten Tomatoes right out of the gate.

Cruise plays an oil baron whose drilling in Greenland knocks an ice shelf loose from a glacier and sets off a worldwide catastrophe. He spends the movie scrambling to cast himself as the planet's rescuer. Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons co-star.

It's a big studio swing arriving in theaters Friday, Oct. 2, with its reviews in a knot. USA Today's critic already worries the divisiveness could keep a deserving Cruise out of a crowded Oscar race. If you're weighing a Friday ticket, it helps to know what the two camps are actually fighting about.

What follows rests on those 14 published excerpts, not a screening. We sorted them into three piles.

• Negative, eight: The Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire, the New York Post, The Wrap, The Guardian, The Austin Chronicle, The Globe and Mail and Slant.
• Positive, four: the Evening Standard, Deadline, the BBC and USA Today.
• Mixed, two: Empire and the Los Angeles Times.

That batch leans harsher than the Rotten Tomatoes number, so read it as a sample of the loudest voices.

Now sort the same excerpts by what they say about Cruise. Six praise the performance. Two of those don't even like the movie. Empire says he “emerges with a win.” The Wrap compares the film to a bad sketch handed a giant budget, then calls his tycoon a “seductive, intriguing enigma.”

Only the Post and Slant come down hard on him.

The Post calls it his “first real stinker in nearly 10 years” and says he did this kind of cartoon far better as Les Grossman in “Tropic Thunder.” The Standard calls it his “best performance since 1999's Magnolia.” One critic hears a joke he's already told; the other hears his strongest work in 27 years. I'd bet on the second reading, because the reviewers trying hardest to bury this film keep stepping around him.

The best case against sparing him is Slant's, which calls the whole thing a “shameless Tom Cruise ego stroke.” If the star spends the big speech yelling and posing, the performance is the problem, whatever the director asked for. That's a real hit. It's also two votes out of 14.

The heat lands on Iñárritu instead. The Globe and Mail calls him a “cinematic charlatan.” The Austin Chronicle grants his technical gifts, then calls the film “insufferable and sanctimonious.” Empire credits Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography and Dennis Gassner's production design, then says the movie seems more interested in itself than in whoever bought a ticket.

Watch which older movies the critics reach for. IndieWire, Empire and the Los Angeles Times all invoke Stanley Kubrick, IndieWire calling it a riff on “Dr. Strangelove.” The Hollywood Reporter, The Guardian and the Chronicle all bring up Adam McKay's “Don't Look Up.” Kubrick is the movie Iñárritu seems to have been aiming at. McKay is the one his detractors think he made. The Chronicle reads “Digger” as a jab at preachy Hollywood climate movies that turns into one.

That looked like a clean line, star against director, until I got to the monologue.

Deadline singles out a 10-minute speech in which Cruise's character owns the damage but spreads the guilt across everyone watching, and calls it “stunning.” Slant describes a speech about our dependence on fossil fuels and calls it “gaseous.” Its complaint is that the tycoon treats himself as the one person who isn't at fault. Both critics are describing a rich man handing the bill to the audience. One hears an indictment; the other hears an alibi.

That's the risk “Digger” takes, and no performance can cover it: a satire that points at the people who paid to see it. Empire finds the message hectoring. The BBC's reviewer grinned through Cruise's lectures on the oil industry anyway. Cruise can't settle that argument for the film. He can only make the speech loud enough to fight over, and on this evidence he did.

“Digger” opens in theaters Oct. 2. IndieWire's pick for its most believable character is a “one-eyed animatronic cat named Maggie.”

Source: hollywoodreporter.com, retrieved September 29, 2026.