Ahead of its October 2 India release, the Alejandro González Iñárritu film has critics arguing over its satire while praising Cruise's transformation into an oil billionaire.
Fifty-one percent. That's where Digger stands on Rotten Tomatoes right now, going by 109 reviews counted so far, and for a Tom Cruise film riding this much curiosity, it's not the number anyone expected.
The film starts its international theatrical run on September 30, with North America following on October 2. India gets it the same day as the US, October 2, which puts Digger in an unusually tight global window for a Cruise release.
What's driving the reviews split is the film itself. This isn't Cruise doing another Mission: Impossible stunt sequence or climbing back into a jet cockpit. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the Oscar winner behind Birdman and The Revenant, Digger casts Cruise as an eccentric oil billionaire pulled into an environmental crisis, and he shows up looking almost unrecognisable for the part. It's the kind of swing that either lands as a career highlight or reads as a miscalculation, and going by the early notices, critics can't agree which one it is.
123telugu reported that some reviewers have singled out Cruise's performance and the film's visual craft for praise, while others have pushed back on the satire and the way the story is told. That divide is showing up across the online conversation too, where reactions have ranged from calling it derivative of Iñárritu's earlier work to genuine curiosity about a director this unpredictable getting a budget this size.
A stacked cast, a bigger question
Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and Michael Stuhlbarg round out the ensemble, and on paper this is one of the more interesting casts assembled around Cruise in years. None of that has stopped the Tomatometer from settling at a number well below what his recent run at the box office would suggest.
Cruise comes into this off Top Gun: Maverick and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, two films that did enormous business and reinforced his reputation as the last true theatrical draw in Hollywood. Digger is a deliberate departure from both, and that's precisely the gamble. A star this bankable attaching himself to a filmmaker known for dividing audiences was always going to be a bet on ambition over certainty.
So the real test isn't the critics' consensus, it's what happens once paying audiences walk in. Digger needs word of mouth to do the heavy lifting that reviews haven't, and India's October 2 release will be one of the first big data points on whether that happens. The coming week decides whether this becomes the film people argue about for the right reasons or the wrong ones.
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