Critic Reviews

What makes the film great, or near great, is its hugeness of aspiration. Iñárritu is trying to make the ultimate statement about our time. He can’t possibly succeed completely, but he takes a big swing and makes serious contact.

Tom Cruise turns in a career best performance in Oscar winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s brilliantly challenging and risky satire Digger.

A bold statement made even bolder by the person starring in it — screw jumping off mountains, satirizing the men in charge with this level of viciousness feels like the biggest risk of Tom Cruise's career. But it pays off brilliantly.

Hilarious, infuriating, confusing, but always powerful, Digger is an audacious swing from both the director and its star. Few will see the twist in the tale coming, and not everyone will like how strange things get. For those who do, this is a wildly inventive adventure that sees Tom Cruise relishing his time outside his comfort zone.

The film leaves us with the uneasy possibility that the story can end, the audience can applaud, and the iceberg will simply keep inching towards our collective doom.

Digger is funny, but not necessarily fun. It's a pitch-black comedy with an even darker message that may just knock the wind out of you.

The biggest problem with Digger might just be that bold ambition. There are a lot of thematic ideas at play here, even before the big shift. A lesser movie might have buckled under the pressure, with too many concepts bouncing off one another and distracting from the underlying throughline. Instead, this film benefits immensely from a fully committed cast and crew, all coming together behind Iñárritu's direction and the screenplay to deliver something masterful.

Rather than being a crowd-pleasing prestige picture, it's a love-it-or-hate-it folly – and there probably will be more people in the "hate it" camp than the "love it" one.

Risky art is often called a high-wire act, but Tom Cruise’s latest film really earns the label. Until it took its very last step, I honestly couldn’t have told you whether it was going to come off or splat headfirst into the sawdust.

It’s uncomfortable, it’s bombastic, but don’t listen to anyone who tells you it isn’t funny.