Digger

Tom Cruise had long wanted to work with the Mexican director of ‘Amores Perros’ and ‘Birdman’. So long, in fact, that he must have forgotten ‘The Revenant’ – for us, the film in which Leonardo DiCaprio sleeps inside a horse’s carcass to avoid freezing to death – and even ‘Bardo’, which alternates between splendours of staging and the shortcomings of the screenplay. It should be added that the artistic pretensions, well concealed in Amores Perros and miraculously so in Birdman too – where the entertainment far outweighed the moral of the story – are now plain for all to see. Tom Cruise relies on a disguise and little else. White hair, facial prosthetics, a paunch, and the gait of an old man in Texan boots do not carry a film. Even if the opening and certain scenes are stunning at first glance, they ultimately trip up the film, which repeatedly loses the thread of the narrative. What remains is the villain Digger Rockwell – a Tom Cruise who keeps his grandfather’s shovel in his office, the very shovel with which his grandfather had first made his fortune. He sleeps with a rather bedraggled cat; she’s decrepit and they’re trying to keep her alive artificially. Trouble looms: a methane leak on one of Digger’s platforms explodes, tearing off a chunk of Greenland that is now drifting towards densely populated Europe. A humanitarian and economic catastrophe is inevitable. The President of the United States – a great and memorable John Goodman, who is also on his deathbed – must be warned. All in all, the film is more curious than successful.