Tom Cruise and Alejandro G. Iñárritu are an intriguing combo. It’s exciting to imagine the world’s biggest movie star working with the Mexican director behind compelling Oscar-winning dramas such as oddball theatre piece Birdman and riveting survival epic The Revenant. True to form with Iñárritu’s work, the resulting collaboration is a visually striking piece of cinema. Unfortunately, it’s also a rather messy one.
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Cruise plays ‘Digger’ Rockwell, the world’s richest man. The 65-year-old oil tycoon has the ear of the American President (John Goodman), lives in a vast mansion with huge gardens and spends his days taking calls from an army of lackeys about his global business wins and woes. Things take a turn when workers at one of Digger’s oil rigs in Greenland reach out to report a methane leak. An explosion soon causes a country-sized sheet of ice to break off and float towards Europe. Scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) warns that tsunamis caused by the drifting iceberg hitting land could cause hundreds of thousands to perish, so Digger and his cronies are tasked to find a solution.
In a different film, perhaps a Gerard Butler action piece, the above plot might make a simplistic but fun romp – an urgent race against time, some snappy quips and maybe a thrilling set-piece or two. Here, towards the end of the first act, there’s a surprising dramatic change that, while interesting, removes the jeopardy and replaces it with much lower stakes. To say what the narrative left-turn is would spoil viewing but suffice to say, it creates another level of story. The film then spends its remaining runtime exploring Digger’s struggles to prevent an environmental disaster and this new secondary plot.
If this all sounds a bit too clever on the part of Iñárritu and his co-writers (regular collaborators Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Nicolás Giacobone, alongside Sabina Berman), that’s because it is. By all means, use a fancy structure if you’re going to show us something revelatory, but otherwise it’s all a bit pointless. Worse than that, for a comedy it’s rarely even amusing.
Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (another Iñárritu mainstay) supplies vivid images, while production designers Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson have created a remarkable world incorporating planes, boats and a theatre – but these should really be in service to the whole feature and not the only great thing about it.
Cruise, under heavy make-up, has some fine moments, particularly during a lengthy pro-oil monologue, but the rest of the cast feel a bit underused. Ahmed and Goodman get some chewy scenes but aren’t stretched, while Sandra Hüller is wasted in her paltry screentime as Digger’s half-sister. Digger – while not irredeemably awful – is ultimately a big disappointment.
Details
- Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu
- Starring: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman
- Release date: October 2 (in UK cinemas)
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