TheWrap calls the Alejandro González Iñárritu film toothless and self-congratulatory even as it praises Cruise's committed, scenery-devouring performance as an oil tycoon villain.
Two days before it opens, "Digger" has already picked up a review that calls it exactly the kind of film it claims to be mocking.
TheWrap's Friday review, headlined "Powerless, Self-Adulating Claptrap," lands hard on Alejandro González Iñárritu's new satire starring Tom Cruise as Digger Rockwell, an oil billionaire who cares about two things: his money and a 30-year-old cat he refuses to let die. Cruise's Rockwell ignores every warning about his drilling operation in Greenland until methane gas wrecks his machines, kills his workers and shears off a glacier headed for northern Europe. The death toll, per the review, is meant to feel unimaginable. Rockwell's response isn't to fix it. It's to protect himself from liability and spin the story his way.
John Goodman plays a blustering American president who hands the crisis to Rockwell because, frankly, it's easier than dealing with it himself. Riz Ahmed is Ganesh, an environmental scientist who slowly comes apart watching the billionaire operate up close.
The review's real target isn't the plot, though. It's the posture. TheWrap argues "Digger" wants credit for skewering the ultra-rich while being funded and released by one of them, and notes the irony that Warner Bros shelved "Coyote vs. Acme" entirely but went all in promoting this one. The comparison the critic keeps circling back to is Looney Tunes: in that universe, the villain gets blown up with a Rube Goldberg machine while a choir sings over the 1812 Overture. In "Digger," per the review, Rockwell gets off light, right around the point the film seems ready to get genuinely nasty.
What the review does grant, without much hedging, is Cruise. It calls this his most energised, fully committed screen work in years, the loudest he's gone since his cameo turn in "Tropic Thunder," and singles out long unbroken takes where he's clearly performing for the sake of being seen performing. Production design gets similar praise, described as elaborate enough to double as the film's real argument, whatever that argument turns out to be.
Online, the reaction so far splits into two camps and neither is flattering to the film's ambitions. Some viewers are calling the whole thing synthetic, the kind of satire an algorithm might generate if you fed it billionaire discourse. Others are invoking Alejandro Jodorowsky as the standard the film doesn't clear, arguing that real cinematic weirdness looks nothing like this.
None of that chatter is a review. It's temperature, not verdict, and TheWrap's is the only formal critique out so far.
"Digger" opens exclusively in theaters on October 2. Whether other outlets land closer to TheWrap's read or find something the first review missed will start to show up over the weekend, once audiences who aren't critics get a seat.
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