I was looking forward to Tom Cruise finally getting off the Hollywood action blockbuster treadmill and back into some headier acting again when Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger was first teased. Then I saw the actual trailer and was immediately turned off. It felt pitched purely as a vehicle for Cruise’s prosthetic-fueled stunt acting. Then I watched it in theaters this week and was blown away. I loved it. What an incredible movie. I have no idea why the critics hate it so much.

Digger has been called “the most divisive movie of 2026,” “a hate letter to life, cinema, art, and its own audience,” and even the “worst movie of Tom Cruise’s career.” Knowing about the 50-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes ahead of time, and the broader Dr. Strangelove vibes swirling around conversations about the movie, I went in expecting, at best, a daring and entertaining mess. I did not expect Digger to be as incredibly watchable, straightforwardly entertaining, and yet also cerebrally satisfying, as it ended up being.

The movie is about an oil man named Digger Rockwell, a larger-than-life figure who is loaded with so many past-their-sell-by-date tropes about post-9/11 American cowboy manifest destiny drill-baby-drill-type antics that the parody would fall flat if not for the 110-percent commitment and innate camera-mugging charm of Hollywood’s number-one leading man. His reckless resource-extraction efforts in Greenland have broken off a chunk of glacier the size of Philadelphia and sent it hurtling toward the coastline of Northern Europe, where it will initiate the largest environmental disaster in recorded history.

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