Digger
Digger is bold, Digger is brash, Digger is not at all funny, but it's a smarter film than it initially presents
The focus of Alejandro González Iñárritu's bonkers satire is Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise), an aged but spry oil tycoon whose plundering of Greenland’s natural resources has caused a massive glacier to snap off and drift towards Europe, where it’ll cause untold damage. When Digger breaks the news to the US’s geriatric President Compson (John Goodman), one of his generals suggests nuking the pesky iceberg.
Iñárritu’s comedy is similarly unsubtle. Digger dotes on a decrepit, incontinent cat that’s obviously portrayed by a raggedy puppet. President Compson has “ass cancer”, which he shouts about loudly and often. When Digger is called to speak at the European Union, everyone looks pale enough to star in a Roy Andersson film. And for some Michael Stuhlbarg's Vice President seems to be channelling one of the shriller Muppets.
It takes a while before Iñárritu reveals why his film is so bombastic and so distractingly theatrical. It turns out Digger is not the empty-headed Dr. Strangelove knockoff it initially presents as, but the smarter, more knotty film that emerges never develops a funny bone. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that men as self-serious as Cruise and Iñárritu can’t do comedy, but the film's cinematic sleight of hand isn’t sharp enough to compensate for the dearth of decent gags. The ending, meanwhile, seems to render the whole project moot, suggesting art can only act as a balm to humanity's woes; it offers no solutions. Perhaps that is true of bad art, a category to which Digger unfortunately belongs.
Released 2 Oct by Warner Bros; certificate 15