30 September 2026

Tom Cruise’s Oscar dream is a disaster

In his new film Digger, Tom Cruise finally gives acting a go. What a shame

Tom Cruise is 64. Although Mission: Impossible – the Final Reckoning will be his last outing as Ethan Hunt, he claims he will go on making movies into his hundreds. Cruise’s films have generated $13bn at the box office, but he has never won an Oscar, except an “Academy Honorary Award” for nothing in particular. His three nominations were long ago, the most recent being for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), his last appearance in a serious auteur drama rather than an action movie. Does he mind?

Perhaps he does. Digger is a clear pitch for Best Actor. There’s no running or jumping here, just an awful lot of acting. It’s written and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who won back-to-back Academy Awards for Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015). But his most recent feature was a flop: Bardo was lambasted as pretentious self-indulgence, a reception Iñárritu claimed to be motivated by anti-Mexican racism. Digger is an overt attempt to reclaim the energies and success of that run of films more than a decade ago. Like Birdman it is meta, a play within a play, a backstage drama – absolute catnip to Academy voters.

Digger opens on a horrible, fat, old plutocrat waking up in a grotesquely palatial bedroom, caressing his darling, Maggie, a bejewelled, stinky, nearly dead fluffy white cat. This is Digger Rockwell, the most powerful and disgusting oil tycoon in the world, so-called because he constantly flourishes the very spade with which his grand-daddy first broke ground to establish the family fortune.

As he gets out of bed with the incontinent mog, we see Digger topless: obese, pallid, saggy and grey-haired. It’s Tom Cruise in a ton of prosthetics, a recourse that never quite succeeds, however state-of-the-art. This look is going to disappoint all Cruise’s action fans, particularly older men who dream they too have still got it. But Cruise wants to show us there’s more to his art than athleticism.

Digger is a monstrous, foul-mouthed bully. When an underling calls in from Greenland to warn him there’s a 5ft crack in the ice shelf where he’s drilling, Digger retorts that it’s nothing; his dick is a tenth of that size. Then his terrified scientific adviser, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed, a great foil), arrives in person to tell him that there’s just been a large explosion and a huge iceberg named Judy, “five times the size of Washington DC”, is heading towards Europe, threatening an apocalyptic tsunami.

Suddenly, the whole American government turns up for an obsequious confab – all racist, sexist old men, led by the vile President Compson (John Goodman, slimmed down these days, but still a superb gargoyle). “Let’s bomb the shit out of her, Mr President, blow that frozen c*** up before she causes any trouble,” the chief of staff roars. Then they fall to patriotic prayer, before the president tells Digger he has “cancer of the asshole… a lump down there the size of a raccoon”, and that it’s Digger’s job to save the world. The satire is broad, then, to say the least.

It is, moreover, filmed in looming close-up from below, in strange bleached light, with everybody shouting and overdoing it. Before long, we get the explanation. The scenery disintegrates, the frame is broken, other people wander on to set and the lighting changes. It’s a play! As in Birdman, the play’s about to open and we’re backstage. Anybody invested in the end-of-the-world thriller that Digger has so far been pretending to be will be sorely disappointed.

There’s a token subplot. The daughter of Curtis Markson, the actor playing Digger (also Cruise of course, equally unappealing), is on a flight that has gone missing in a storm, just as he faces his first night. Can he still perform?

When we go back to the play we’re constantly reminded it’s theatre (we see planes, but also the wires they’re suspended on). There’s a big scene in which the megalomaniac Digger confronts all the world’s infuriated leaders in a big auditorium. Spinning round and round, climbing over the furniture, he outrageously insults them, telling them that the truth is they love oil, “the mother’s milk of Earth”.

It’s one of the most obvious Oscar-bait showreels ever made – an actor playing an actor playing a monster – but I doubt it’ll do the trick. The zingy cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki, the weird score by Cosmo Sheldrake, the intricate production design and ambitious make-up, are all prizeworthy maybe. But this is a film without a single sympathetic character, a film that ends up eating itself. Big concept, no heart.

Digger is in cinemas on 2 October

[Further reading: Why Andy Burnham should go to bed with a Trollope]