Everyone has seen the “Keep Gambling” meme while scrolling Instagram Reels before where a miner gives up right before they find diamonds; the obvious joke being that if one keeps digging (or gambling), they’ll eventually dig their own grave. That meme is not particularly funny, instructive, or interesting, but Digger (2026) could have learned a lot from it.
Two-time Best Director Oscar winner Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu unleashes an unrelenting flurry of obnoxious, stale, and crude jokes at the audience that would have anyone begging for the brevity and wit of a meme on Instagram Reels. Some of the jokes include: seeing Digger Rockwell’s (Tom Cruise) buttcrack, various people tripping over a shovel, the President of the United States exclaiming “I have cancer of the asshole,” and jamming a thermometer up a cat’s butt.
That Digger, a movie advertised as and generally understood to be a comedy, so thoroughly fails to be funny should not be surprising, given that it credits four screenwriters. Imagine four people trying to tell you a joke simultaneously. That doesn’t sound very funny, does it? Now imagine those four people were telling you a joke where the punchline was ramming a thermometer into a kitty’s rectum.
The silence from a packed screening sounded more like a death knell after each wild, broad swing. Still, I let the plot unfold, hoping I could find it stimulating enough to carry me through. The film follows the eponymous character Digger Rockwell, an ultra wealthy oil tycoon, after his rapacious drilling efforts in Greenland lead to a catastrophic explosion. The explosion, mixed with unfavorable weather conditions, has sent a massive chunk of ice hurtling towards the European continent bound to rack up immense casualties, so Digger meets with the President of the United States to figure out a solution. Shenanigans ensue as Digger’s Chief Environmental Scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) breaks rank, and the President slowly descends into torpor and incontinence—another icecap starts hustling towards the Alaskan coastline. All the efforts to alleviate the damage only exacerbate the issues, as the film is ultimately a parable about the ultra wealthy and their destruction of the Earth, aided and abetted by politicians. Sadly, the film’s pertinence to the current American political moment fails to overcome the droning, confused repetition of exposition and trite themes.
Even more unfortunately, Iñárritu hired some of the best working talent in the industry for his unfunny and ridiculous romp. One of the greatest people to ever wield a camera, cinematographer and Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, delivers boring, muted visuals for the film, his worst showing since Taylor Swift’s “Patient Zero” music video (2026). Oscar-winning production designer Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson impress throughout, especially with the delightful animatronic of Digger’s prized cat, but they also tend to gild the lily. One of the first shots in the movie lingers on a painting of a lion killing a deer in Digger’s lavish bedroom. Immediately, I scribbled, “on the nose” in my notes. Thudding, leaden touches like this shot would be returned to throughout, namely showing the painting again, as if audiences didn’t understand the idea the first time.
Even the side characters have some of the best talent puppeteering them. Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller as Digger’s sister Emma is woefully lost; in her defense, Cruise’s wild Texas accent is hard for anyone to follow. Oscar winner Riz Ahmed tries his best and succeeds at imbuing Ganesh with genuine, affecting pathos. Contrary to the other actors, Oscar nominee Jesse Plemons steals the show in his brief screentime, a tour de force on par with his one scene performance in the deeply underrated Civil War (2024).
However, every Tom Cruise movie is first and foremost about Tom Cruise. After aging out of action stardom, he makes his return to prestige work. Cruise is committed, giving his body to his work, but he has never been an emptier vessel than in this film, and that’s coming from someone who watched the soulless disaster that is Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) in theaters. Even without being tasked with stunts, Cruise fails to embody a fraction of the dramatic brilliance he once channeled in Jerry Maguire (1996) or Collateral (2004).
Now, I must give out an obligatory SPOILER WARNING from this point on because perhaps Cruise intended his performance to be so husklike.
Just after the first act, the film reveals that, so far, the audience had been watching a tech rehearsal for an upcoming play performance. This helps to explain the humor while also adding depth to what we had just witnessed. After long periods of seeing the fully rendered play, the film cuts back to Cruise as the actor playing Digger Rockwell managing the stress of opening night and his daughter flying in a storm. At one point, he thinks he’s lost her, but more importantly, he has lost faith in the 25th anniversary production of “Fossil Fools”—that’s right, another zinger from these four brilliant screenwriters. He gets his head back on straight after Plemons’ character Kenny gives a grand speech about belief in the play, no matter all its ridiculous fallacies, because of the joy it brings people. The show goes on and concludes in rapturous applause, even though the environment has actually been irreparably ruined and the ultra wealthy stay in power.
Now, dear reader, you may be thinking, “Hudson, why didn’t you get to the twist earlier? That fundamentally reshapes how all the jokes function. You moron, it’s anticomedy, haven’t you heard of it? The joke is that shoving a thermometer into a cat’s asshole actually ISN’T funny!”
My rejoinder to this smug strawman, reader, would be that the movie leaves these ideas even less investigated than I do. Digger’s broad and offensive ugliness fundamentally clashes with its ruminations about the social function of artwork. This tension may be most offensive—I say ‘may be’ because there’s too many moments to choose—in its allusion to John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977). Whatever your take on Cassavetes may be, that Iñárritu thinks he can channel even a modicum of the tact, sensitivity, and aplomb that made Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands darlings of world cinema is insulting. Again, this movie expects the audience to laugh after people repeatedly trip over a shovel, a ‘joke’ that happens before any good faith may be earned with the twist.
The twist, if it should even be understood as that, does not work prima facie, as it requires spending 90% of the movie on a bad piece of art and then insisting that art does not alter power structures. Even more frustratingly, the twist also makes the artists putting on the play the butt of the joke, not the billionaires and politicians. Is an artist’s failure funny? I don’t really think so, at least in the abstract. I find an artist’s failures even less funny when the artist was attempting to satirize billionaires and their destruction of the world around us. In fact, I find it sad; Digger views these failures instead as laughably stupid.
In the final moments, the camera salaciously lingers on the audience’s pleased roars as Digger meets his end and then shows the audience putting on their gas masks to withstand the environmental destruction outside, making a broader point about art’s impotence in the face of capital. Even if Digger doesn’t, I believe in art’s ability to fight the power; see page 277 of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for robust theorizing about this debate, or look to the socioeconomic impact of Top Gun: Maverick, an earlier Tom Cruise movie.
Even beyond questions of truth and belief, I find Digger’s ending offensively and profoundly nihilistic. I despise the fact that I spent two hours of my time just to hear that, actually, art does not matter, and I, the probably-poor viewer, have actually spent my time cheering on the destruction of the world around me. I’ve said a lot about Digger being deeply unfunny, but in the ending, it does land one big last laugh on the audience.
76°F
Leisure
Dignorant Garbage: Digger More like Digsaster
By Quinn Ross
6:05 PM
Everyone has seen the “Keep Gambling” meme while scrolling Instagram Reels before where a miner gives up right before they find diamonds; the obvious joke being that if one keeps digging (or gambling), they’ll eventually dig their own grave. That meme is not particularly funny, instructive, or interesting, but Digger (2026) could have learned a lot from it.
Two-time Best Director Oscar winner Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu unleashes an unrelenting flurry of obnoxious, stale, and crude jokes at the audience that would have anyone begging for the brevity and wit of a meme on Instagram Reels. Some of the jokes include: seeing Digger Rockwell’s (Tom Cruise) buttcrack, various people tripping over a shovel, the President of the United States exclaiming “I have cancer of the asshole,” and jamming a thermometer up a cat’s butt.
That Digger, a movie advertised as and generally understood to be a comedy, so thoroughly fails to be funny should not be surprising, given that it credits four screenwriters. Imagine four people trying to tell you a joke simultaneously. That doesn’t sound very funny, does it? Now imagine those four people were telling you a joke where the punchline was ramming a thermometer into a kitty’s rectum.
The silence from a packed screening sounded more like a death knell after each wild, broad swing. Still, I let the plot unfold, hoping I could find it stimulating enough to carry me through. The film follows the eponymous character Digger Rockwell, an ultra wealthy oil tycoon, after his rapacious drilling efforts in Greenland lead to a catastrophic explosion. The explosion, mixed with unfavorable weather conditions, has sent a massive chunk of ice hurtling towards the European continent bound to rack up immense casualties, so Digger meets with the President of the United States to figure out a solution. Shenanigans ensue as Digger’s Chief Environmental Scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) breaks rank, and the President slowly descends into torpor and incontinence—another icecap starts hustling towards the Alaskan coastline. All the efforts to alleviate the damage only exacerbate the issues, as the film is ultimately a parable about the ultra wealthy and their destruction of the Earth, aided and abetted by politicians. Sadly, the film’s pertinence to the current American political moment fails to overcome the droning, confused repetition of exposition and trite themes.
Even more unfortunately, Iñárritu hired some of the best working talent in the industry for his unfunny and ridiculous romp. One of the greatest people to ever wield a camera, cinematographer and Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, delivers boring, muted visuals for the film, his worst showing since Taylor Swift’s “Patient Zero” music video (2026). Oscar-winning production designer Dennis Gassner and Richard L. Johnson impress throughout, especially with the delightful animatronic of Digger’s prized cat, but they also tend to gild the lily. One of the first shots in the movie lingers on a painting of a lion killing a deer in Digger’s lavish bedroom. Immediately, I scribbled, “on the nose” in my notes. Thudding, leaden touches like this shot would be returned to throughout, namely showing the painting again, as if audiences didn’t understand the idea the first time.
Even the side characters have some of the best talent puppeteering them. Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller as Digger’s sister Emma is woefully lost; in her defense, Cruise’s wild Texas accent is hard for anyone to follow. Oscar winner Riz Ahmed tries his best and succeeds at imbuing Ganesh with genuine, affecting pathos. Contrary to the other actors, Oscar nominee Jesse Plemons steals the show in his brief screentime, a tour de force on par with his one scene performance in the deeply underrated Civil War (2024).
However, every Tom Cruise movie is first and foremost about Tom Cruise. After aging out of action stardom, he makes his return to prestige work. Cruise is committed, giving his body to his work, but he has never been an emptier vessel than in this film, and that’s coming from someone who watched the soulless disaster that is Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) in theaters. Even without being tasked with stunts, Cruise fails to embody a fraction of the dramatic brilliance he once channeled in Jerry Maguire (1996) or Collateral (2004).
Now, I must give out an obligatory SPOILER WARNING from this point on because perhaps Cruise intended his performance to be so husklike.
Just after the first act, the film reveals that, so far, the audience had been watching a tech rehearsal for an upcoming play performance. This helps to explain the humor while also adding depth to what we had just witnessed. After long periods of seeing the fully rendered play, the film cuts back to Cruise as the actor playing Digger Rockwell managing the stress of opening night and his daughter flying in a storm. At one point, he thinks he’s lost her, but more importantly, he has lost faith in the 25th anniversary production of “Fossil Fools”—that’s right, another zinger from these four brilliant screenwriters. He gets his head back on straight after Plemons’ character Kenny gives a grand speech about belief in the play, no matter all its ridiculous fallacies, because of the joy it brings people. The show goes on and concludes in rapturous applause, even though the environment has actually been irreparably ruined and the ultra wealthy stay in power.
Now, dear reader, you may be thinking, “Hudson, why didn’t you get to the twist earlier? That fundamentally reshapes how all the jokes function. You moron, it’s anticomedy, haven’t you heard of it? The joke is that shoving a thermometer into a cat’s asshole actually ISN’T funny!”
My rejoinder to this smug strawman, reader, would be that the movie leaves these ideas even less investigated than I do. Digger’s broad and offensive ugliness fundamentally clashes with its ruminations about the social function of artwork. This tension may be most offensive—I say ‘may be’ because there’s too many moments to choose—in its allusion to John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1977). Whatever your take on Cassavetes may be, that Iñárritu thinks he can channel even a modicum of the tact, sensitivity, and aplomb that made Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands darlings of world cinema is insulting. Again, this movie expects the audience to laugh after people repeatedly trip over a shovel, a ‘joke’ that happens before any good faith may be earned with the twist.
The twist, if it should even be understood as that, does not work prima facie, as it requires spending 90% of the movie on a bad piece of art and then insisting that art does not alter power structures. Even more frustratingly, the twist also makes the artists putting on the play the butt of the joke, not the billionaires and politicians. Is an artist’s failure funny? I don’t really think so, at least in the abstract. I find an artist’s failures even less funny when the artist was attempting to satirize billionaires and their destruction of the world around us. In fact, I find it sad; Digger views these failures instead as laughably stupid.
In the final moments, the camera salaciously lingers on the audience’s pleased roars as Digger meets his end and then shows the audience putting on their gas masks to withstand the environmental destruction outside, making a broader point about art’s impotence in the face of capital. Even if Digger doesn’t, I believe in art’s ability to fight the power; see page 277 of Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War for robust theorizing about this debate, or look to the socioeconomic impact of Top Gun: Maverick, an earlier Tom Cruise movie.
Even beyond questions of truth and belief, I find Digger’s ending offensively and profoundly nihilistic. I despise the fact that I spent two hours of my time just to hear that, actually, art does not matter, and I, the probably-poor viewer, have actually spent my time cheering on the destruction of the world around me. I’ve said a lot about Digger being deeply unfunny, but in the ending, it does land one big last laugh on the audience.
Quinn Ross
Quinn Ross (he/him) is the leisure editor and a sophomore in the college (go amst!) Some of his favorite things to do are crop his t-shirts, listen to music while he sleeps, send people Instagram reels, and wear jeans (usually 2+ pairs at a time). He can usually be found blasting OsamaSon in his earbuds, talking about why Albuquerque is the best (it is btw), or eating really fast and finishing his food before you.
More: Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, art commentary, digger, movie review, Tom Cruise
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