Digger (2026)★ 8.1/10

It’s not that often I can say the following, Tom Cruise is in a new movie that’s not MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. The movie is called DIGGER, a movie that will be debated and talked about for a very long time. On the surface, it’s a dark comedy about an oil magnate Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise) who is desperate to dig himself out of a situation that he caused. This movie is a furious, absurd, and surprisingly thoughtful satire about a world that knows it’s destroying itself but still looks to the same wealthy, powerful people who helped create the problem to save it. Cruise is terrific, turning his familiar movie-star charisma into something grotesque. He’s funny, pathetic, magnetic, and terrifying because Digger genuinely seems to believe his own mythology. The film understands that enormous power and enormous insecurity can exist in the same person. But what stayed with me most is how the movie eventually turns its criticism toward us. It isn’t satisfied with mocking billionaires, corporations, or political hypocrisy. It questions whether outrage itself has become entertainment—whether we watch stories about catastrophe, recognize all the problems, congratulate ourselves for understanding them, and then go right back to living the same way. Even the film’s excess feels purposeful. It’s loud, messy, exhausting, hilarious, ugly, and visually beautiful, sometimes all at once. It condemns spectacle while deliberately becoming a spectacle itself. That contradiction is what makes it work. Underneath all the insanity is a bleak question: Why do we keep waiting for powerful people to save us from problems their power helped create? It doesn’t offer an easy answer. It makes us sit with the question.