Digger

Alejandro González Iñárritu's first film since Bardo, 129 minutes of climate-crisis satire with Tom Cruise top-lining as Digger Rockwell, an oil baron whose offshore rig perched on a glacier does what offshore rigs perched on glaciers tend to do. John Goodman plays a bloviating president, Jesse Plemons plays a buttoned-down company man named Kenny, and Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, and Michael Stuhlbarg fill out the room. There's a metafictional conceit layered over the whole thing, and the title of the play-within-the-film tells you how subtle the movie plans to be about any of this.

Cruise is actually going for it. He hasn't done unglamorous character work in years, and the oil-baron bit lets him chew, sweat, and look genuinely unhinged in a way the Mission movies won't allow. Plemons is the quiet center of gravity; every scene he's in slows down and starts breathing. Ahmed finds a human frequency the script keeps denying everybody else. Iñárritu and DP Darius Khondji stage two or three set pieces — the rig sequence especially — with the scale and composure that still make Iñárritu one of the few people who can spend $120 million on a single idea. When the film shuts up and lets images do the arguing, it works.

It almost never shuts up. Characters announce the thesis, then another character restates the thesis, then Goodman delivers the thesis as a monologue to a room that nods along. The metafictional frame, which could've been a scalpel, functions more like a shrug: whenever the story paints itself into a corner, the movie steps outside itself to wink. Hüller and Stuhlbarg are given almost nothing to play. At 129 minutes it feels longer, because the pacing collapses every time Iñárritu reaches for a Big Statement, which is often.

If Bardo worked for you, or if you'll follow Iñárritu anywhere he goes on sheer craft, there's a version of this where the ambition is enough. Everyone else: this is the Adam McKay school of issue filmmaking (Don't Look Up, Vice) crossed with late-period auteur self-regard. If you bounced off Don't Look Up for the same reason your dentist bounced off it, you'll bounce harder here. People who showed up for Cruise doing Cruise things will be stranded by episode two of the play-within-a-play.

SLOP because the craft is real and the movie wastes it. Cruise is giving a performance, Plemons is giving a performance, Khondji is shooting a movie — and the screenplay keeps interrupting all of them to make sure you got the point. This is the Lecture Test in a lab coat. The themes aren't the problem; the delivery is. A better draft trusts the iceberg to do the talking and lets Plemons sit in a room with Cruise for ten minutes without a speech. Instead the film pauses every twenty minutes so a character can read the headline out loud. Ambition way out past execution. Skip it, or wait for streaming and watch the first forty minutes.