Digger review: Tom Cruise's oil tycoon misfires in Iñárritu satire

Alejandro González Iñárritu's new film "Digger" is "the most disappointing film of the year," according to the Guardian's review, published on 29 September 2026. The Oscar-winning Mexican director's eco-satire stars Tom Cruise as an ageing Texan oil tycoon whose irresponsible drilling causes a global crisis.

The Guardian's critic calls the film "an exasperatingly shallow, laborious, self-congratulatory satire with a trick up its sleeve, featuring very good actors giving not very good performances."

Cruise plays "Digger" Rockwell, a paunchy, balding oil baron introduced fretfully rising in the morning, cooing over his incontinent old cat and taking urgent messages from underlings about a developing situation at his Arctic drilling station. The performance is boisterous, and the review finds "moments to enjoy" in it, but it does not escape the film's broader problems.

Iñárritu's satire comes with high expectations. As the review notes, a new movie from the director of multiple Oscar-winning films is "always an event." This time, the reviewer writes, the event is a letdown.

Cruise's character carries the familiar markers of the type: a good-ol'-boy twang and a Stetson the critic compares to Slim Pickens's bomb-riding army major in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr Strangelove." His prosthetics include a wispy baldingness. His prized possession is a battered old shovel, used a century earlier by his grandfather, a penniless young man digging for black gold in Texas. Digger brandishes the shovel to make his points.

The film's strongest assets sit behind the camera. The review locates the movie's value "chiefly in some dreamlike and disturbing images, distorted and bulging from the screen," created by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Dennis Gassner.

Lubezki is a longtime Iñárritu collaborator and multiple Oscar winner in his own right, which makes the visual distinction of "Digger" consistent with the director's earlier work — even as the surrounding film falls short of that standard.

The premise gives Iñárritu clear satirical material: one man's recklessness at the drill head escalates into a crisis with global consequences. Yet the critic finds the execution laboured rather than sharp, and the film's self-regard works against its message.

For a director whose previous releases have shaped awards seasons and international conversation, the verdict registers as a genuine fall. The review's closing judgment — that the movie is exasperating, shallow and self-congratulatory — sets a low bar for whatever Iñárritu attempts next, and suggests audiences should temper expectations for "Digger" ahead of its release.