Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu‘s mammoth misfire “Digger” is as insufferable as movies get. The film is constantly insisting it’s saying something profound while practically screaming its metaphors directly into your face. This is not a case of me misunderstanding what the film is trying to do. I understood it perfectly. It’s just a really, really bad movie.
There are maybe 20 minutes of decent ideas here, and that’s being generous. The film is packed with big, conceptual, bombastic observations about environmental collapse, corporate greed, artistic ego, and the people who turn human suffering into prestige bait. None of those ideas are inherently bad, and most are actually compelling. The problem is that Iñárritu has absolutely no faith in the audience to figure any of them out. Everything is overstated, underlined, explained, and then underlined again. At one point, it literally pulls back the curtain to make sure we understand the metaphor. Subtlety has clearly left the building.
Iñárritu also can’t decide what he wants his movie to be. It’s part satirical workplace comedy and part surreal apocalyptic survival thriller, and it feels as though two completely different scripts were crudely stitched together. The tonal shift might have worked if there was smoother connectivity between the two big ideas, but the film is so poorly put together that it feels increasingly desperate to prove how important it is.
And that’s the biggest problem with this film. It’s smug. Painfully smug. It seems determined to mock artists who make “message movies” for exploiting real suffering in pursuit of awards and prestige, all while congratulating itself for being clever enough to make that observation. Iñárritu spends so much time sneering at the very kind of pretentious filmmaking he is simultaneously indulging in that it becomes hard to tell whether the joke is intentional. If you’re looking for a textbook off-putting movie, this is it.
There is some fun in watching Tom Cruise (and co-stars Riz Ahmed, Sandra Hüller, Jesse Plemons, and John Goodman) go completely unhinged, but even his mega-star wattage can’t carry this mess. He throws himself into the material with enough manic energy to occasionally make it entertaining, but there simply isn’t a coherent movie underneath all that performance.
This is Iñárritu making his “Megalopolis” with huge ideas, enormous swings, and an almost comical lack of restraint. It could have been gloriously weird, but “Digger” mostly feels like a movie desperately trying to convince you that it is ten times smarter than you are.
By: Louisa Moore
