Digger Review: Tom Cruise's Best Performance in a Film That Shouts

Digger is worth watching for Tom Cruise and for the images of a world coming apart that the rest of the film keeps interrupting. Alejandro González Iñárritu's satire puts Cruise in prosthetics as an ageing Texas oil tycoon who talks the White House into solving a crisis he caused, and the performance is the best thing in the film. The film around it is loud, smug and slow. Critics and audiences split on the same line. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 53 percent from 333 reviews and Metacritic sits at 46 from 60 critic reviews, both checked on October 21, 2026.

Digger opened in US cinemas through Warner Bros. Pictures on October 2, 2026, runs 129 minutes and carries an R rating for pervasive language. The Numbers, checked on October 21, 2026, has it at $17,328,096 domestic and $41,828,096 worldwide. The film was produced by Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, designed by Dennis Gassner, and scored by Cosmo Sheldrake.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it for Cruise, who is spectacular, and for the images, which are extraordinary. Skip it if you need a satire that argues its case instead of announcing it. A 129-minute, R-rated comedy-drama with 53 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 333 critic reviews as of October 21, 2026, and 46 on Metacritic. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Digger is about

Digger Rockwell (Cruise) is an old oilman in a mansion decorated with antlers and stuffed animals, waking beside a cat that is disintegrating by the hour. He is roused by a call from the Arctic. An explosion at one of his rigs has freed a vast ice floe, many times the size of Manhattan, which is drifting toward the coast of Norway, and where it lands it will be a nuclear strike in slow motion. Empire's Olly Richards wrote the floe's name into the review: "an iceberg named Judy is on her way to decimate Scandinavia."

Digger denies the danger, then denies it harder. The president (John Goodman) and his cabinet gather, along with Digger's chief scientist Dr. Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), who has been warning him for years, and one overeager general proposes bombing the floe to stop the spread, as Deadline's Pete Hammond reported. Digger takes over the meeting anyway, lambasting the president for his reluctance to take responsibility for a situation his own drilling created, and then he goes to the United Nations and tells them the truth, which is that renewables will not save anyone and that the world owes him. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw described the character's Stetson as "borrowed from Slim Pickens's bomb-riding army major in Kubrick's Dr Strangelove," which is a fair summary of the whole enterprise.

The film changes shape about half an hour in, and the change is both the point and the problem. The studio asked critics to keep the turn quiet so audiences could meet it cold, and a trailer gives nothing away. What comes after is built as a counterweight to what came before, and the two halves never quite agree on what they are for.

Cast and performances

Cruise plays Digger under a bald cap, jowls, a Texas drawl and a great deal of Kazu Hiro prosthetic work, and he is extraordinary. Empire's Olly Richards wrote that "Cruise emerges with a win, reminding us how riveting he can be as an actor, not just as a movie star," and that the role "demands fearless commitment, which he certainly gives." RogerEbert.com's Robert Daniels saw the same thing from the other side of the screen, noting that "Cruise's performance, consequently, moves with slippery intensity." Deadline's Pete Hammond was the warmest of the reviews on record, noting that "Cruise has never done a role like this one." Even the harshest notices end up praising the man rather than the film.

Ganesh is the conscience, and Riz Ahmed plays him as the only person in the room who is telling the truth, with "a conflicted scientist who could have bumbled in from a Wes Anderson picture," in Richards's phrase. Emma D'Arcy plays Lina, Digger's assistant, and John Goodman plays President Compson as a cranky, sweating, dying man who takes orders from the man who caused the disaster. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw noted that Sandra Hüller has next to nothing to do as Emma, Digger's half-sister, a role whose substance may well have been "abandoned in the edit." Jesse Plemons is the strangest presence in the film, and the only one the audience never gets a straight answer about.

What works

The images. Lubezki and Gassner build a world that is tipping, warped and gorgeous, and the palette is doing half the persuading, with the main run of the story in a putrid grey and everything around it in full colour. The Guardian's Bradshaw put the film's real value in those pictures: "some dreamlike and disturbing images, distorted and bulging from the screen." The close read: Cruise's face under a mask of old-man latex, a floe the size of a city sliding across black water, a dying cat in a mansion kept breathing by money, a room full of shouting men in grey. Those are the frames worth the ticket.

Cruise's nerve. He plays an oil tycoon with a face full of latex and a drawl borrowed from Texas, and he does it without a wink. Variety's Owen Gleiberman noted the physical transformation, "pounds of jowly make-up and thinning disheveled white hair," and put Cruise going over the top in his headline. The performance is the reason the headline works.

The dialogue when it is fast. The rat-a-tat exchanges between Digger and the White House have the snap of a forty-something screwball comedy, and the film's best joke is that the oilman's greed and the government's cowardice are the same reflex.

What doesn't

It shouts. Every theme gets a monologue, and the monologues are delivered at full volume with the camera tilting up. Robert Daniels at RogerEbert.com, who gave it two stars out of four, found the film's dialogue "tellingly didactic" and its actors "scream their lines during overcooked shouting matches, as though the louder they verbalize any given idea, the more it'll mean." He also wrote that the film "is devoid of substance," and closed on it as "a sneering premise awaiting a drop of humanism." The Guardian's Bradshaw called it "an exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory satire with a trick up its sleeve, featuring very good actors giving not very good performances." Empire's Olly Richards, who was kinder, still found the film unable to stop admiring itself, and named the chief problem: "it appears more concerned with itself than with the audience."

The supporting cast is scenery. Richards noted that Hüller, Goodman and Plemons "each play a single note," and that the film, "for a film about the complexity of mankind, shows scant interest in actual people."

The lecture. Variety's Gleiberman was blunt about the intent, and it is the right objection: "It wants to be the 'Dr. Strangelove' of climate change. But instead of laughs, it has in-your-face overacting and a didactic disaster scenario." Deadline's Pete Hammond agreed with the diagnosis and still went the other way, arguing that the film "is a satire of disaster movies that says the real disaster is ourselves," and that "it is a comedy, but the laughs mask a strong message that should be taken seriously."

What audiences say

The gap is the story. Rotten Tomatoes has the Tomatometer at 53 percent from 333 reviews and the Popcornmeter at 76 percent from more than 1,000 verified ratings, a twenty-three point split. The platform's critics consensus calls the film "a bold swing of the shovel by Tom Cruise and Alejandro González Iñárritu that misses as often as it strikes gold."

Metacritic's metascore is 46 from 60 critic reviews, labelled "Mixed or Average," with a user score of 7.2 from 268 ratings. Letterboxd's member average is 3.91 from 555,194 ratings and 288,387 written reviews. TMDB has the film at 7.49 from 432 votes. Every figure in this section was checked on October 21, 2026. Critics and the paying audience are looking at two different movies, and the one the audience is enjoying is Cruise.

Where to watch Digger

Digger is still in US cinemas. JustWatch searched 376 streaming services on October 21, 2026 and could not find an offer for it online, and TMDB's US provider list for the United States is empty, with no subscription service, no purchase and no free option. Tickets are on sale through Cinemark, Harkins Theatres and Marcus Theatres.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Digger streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Digger worth watching? Yes, for Cruise, who does something with a face full of latex that no one else in the business could do, and for a set of images that make the last twenty years of news feel like a weather forecast. The 53 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and the 3.91 on Letterboxd are the score for a film that is a stagey, self-admiring, exhausting afternoon. The 76 percent from verified audience viewers is the score for the actor. Iñárritu made a loud picture about a loud man, and the loud man is the reason to go.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Digger

The film is a play. Everything from the first scene, the mansion and the meltdown and the president, is a staging of a multi-set satire called Fossil Fools, and the audience the film shows us appears only at the end of the performance. Tom Cruise is not Digger Rockwell. Cruise is Curtis Markson, a stage actor taking on the role, and the man who hired him is Kenny, played by Jesse Plemons.

Kenny is the nephew. The play has been a cult hit on the London stage for decades, and Kenny saw it and hated it, because the family got laughed at. He bought the rights, hired the director Hannah (Sophie Wilde), and went looking for Curtis specifically because the actor reminded him of his uncle. He runs a company called Worldwide Security. In the play, a redheaded boy hangs around Digger's mansion, and in the present of the film that boy is the man in the wings who bought the rights and hired the cast.

Meanwhile the film says the real Digger died by suicide on a derelict oil rig years ago, and the ice that the play destroys Europe with has, in the film's own present, also dropped nuclear waste on the Alaska coast. Curtis is also looking for his own daughter, whose flight out of Jamaica went missing after a storm turned the hurricane into a category six.

The play ends with Digger and the president dying, and the audience explodes into tears and jeers at the same time. Kenny keeps repeating that the genre does not matter, that it is satire, farce, drama or tragedy, it does not matter, because the ending is the part they came for.

Then the doors of the theatre open and the audience walks out into the world the play was about. The air is filthy and everyone has a respirator on. Drones hang overhead. Robot police move down the street. Soldiers stand by Humvees with guns on civilians. Every wall is painted with slogans like "Compliance is freedom." Kenny stands at the door and watches them go out, and the film ends there, on the question of whether a very loud play about a greedy man has changed anything about the world that made him, or has just given everyone a good evening.