'Digger' Review: Tom Cruise Shines but an Oscar is Mission Impossible
By Seb Jenkins - October 1, 2026
Tom Cruise puts in his best performance in decades as wealthy oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, but Iñárritu’s pace-less plot will polarise moviegoers.
What gets bigger the more you take away? A hole! And boy, does Digger dig its own mighty hole to crawl into. What should have been a fantastically eccentric rollercoaster ride turns into a surface-level meta commentary on climate change that could have been an email. Alejandro González Iñárritu may have four Academy Awards to his name, but Digger is a film that peaks too early with a joyless twist and never quite manages to delve deeper than the tip of the iceberg. Birdman had Michael Keaton, The Revenant had Leonardo DiCaprio, and Tom Cruise enchantingly fills the shoes of an Oscar-hopeful leading man, but it turns out you can’t put a prosthetic on a turd.
When oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Cruise) wakes up in the morning, he has no idea that his cat urine-soaked pyjamas are going to be the least of his problems. Scientist Sandy Clarkson is on the phone from the oil rig in Greenland, and if there’s one thing Digger loves almost as much as his haunted, old cat, it's his oil rig in Greenland. There’s just one problem: the crack in the ice Sandy has been warning Digger about for weeks has gotten a little bigger. So big, in fact, that an ice shelf the size of Manhattan has broken away and is now hurtling toward Europe like a rubber dinghy rapids. Digger, more focused on financial fallout than loss of life, is one Texan twang away from screaming ‘yee-haw’ and firing guns into the air like he’s on The Simpsons.
Unfortunately for the unsuspecting Europeans, Digger has a constant angel and devil on his shoulder throughout the impending crisis. On the one side, he has the nervous, bumbling Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) who does his desperate best to fill in the dastardly hole that Digger dug. On the other side, the ghoulish President Compson (John Goodman) and his merry band of red button military men suggest everything from blowing the iceberg up with missiles to… blowing the iceberg up with nukes. They like blowing stuff up, these chaps.
Other characters include a real who’s who of criminally underused actors. For fans of Bugonia, Jesse Plemons is not given the chance to flex a single one of his chilling acting muscles. Famed for her performance in Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra Hüller is forgotten in Digger. Emma D’Arcy plays Mr Rockwell’s PA, which we can only assume stands for Pretty Anonymous. Michael Stuhlbarg takes on the role of vice-president, but it could have been JD Vance for all we know. All phenomenal actors, but all given lifeless roles.
Only three cast members are given any real meat to play with, and none of them leave anything on the bone. Cruise is delightfully chaotic as the obstinate old tycoon, simultaneously frustrating and electric as Digger races around like an unapologetic bull on an oil rig. The President may shirk responsibility at every turn (I wonder where he learnt that), but Goodman steps up to the plate as he always does with a wonderfully satirical take on modern leadership. Ahmed once again proves that he is among the finest British actors of his generation.
All of this should point toward a worthy contender come Oscar season. Unfortunately, one problem looms even larger than the impending iceberg itself — the plot twist. Iñárritu attempts to take a big swing nice and early in Digger, but all he does is lasso the audience and yank them out of any semblance of immersion. Like a bucking bull, it’s impossible to recover any investment in the story or characters. Don’t get us wrong, Digger has plenty to say about climate change, the fallacy of oil, and the pandemic of accountability, but it says most of it within 30 minutes and struggles to drill any deeper. Cruise and co save it from disaster with some entertaining performances, but black gold this is not.
'Digger' releases in cinemas on Friday October 2, 2026.
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Seb Jenkins
Writer
A freelance writer, day-to-day Seb covers stories about his beloved Tottenham Hotspur, while coming up with wacky ideas for thriller novels.
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