Is ‘Digger’ the Tom Cruise Movie We’ve Been Waiting For? Plus: Our Top 10 Tom Cruise Performances.

Key takeaways

• Digger opens as a broad, Dr. Strangelove-style satire about oil baron Digger Rockwell (Cruise) living in an animatronic-cat-filled mansion while his drilling project threatens to flood Northern Europe—then, 20-30 minutes in, reveals itself to be a play-within-the-film, with Cruise also playing an actor performing Digger in a lavish stage production. Both hosts say this twist recontextualizes the movie's broadness and elevates it considerably.
• Cruise delivers a career-spanning showcase: full prosthetics and a Jerry Jones-style Texas accent for a "You can't handle the truth"-style tribunal monologue defending oil and billionaire excess, followed by quiet, internal, de-aged-feeling scenes as the real actor dealing with his daughter's plane going missing; something Sean and Amanda say they haven't seen from him in 15 years.
• The hosts compare the film to Birdman, Megalopolis, Don't Look Up, and Mickey 17, arguing Iñárritu's weakness is that his big ideas ("billionaires are bad," "we're doomed") are simplistic and his films often feel like he's "settling scores," unlike a filmmaker such as Wes Anderson.
• A subplot involving producer Jesse Plemons (the real-life nephew of the Digger figure, staging the play as image rehabilitation) and a resolution where Cruise's daughter is saved purely because the billionaire producer bought his way out of the crisis undercuts the film's ecological message, leaving the hosts unsure whether the movie even knows what it's arguing.
• They predict Digger will underperform financially (likely under $134 million worldwide, possibly a sub-$10 million opening weekend) but expect it to gain a cult reclamation in years to come, similar to other audacious studio swings.
• Running down the Best Actor race, they place Andrew Scott (Elsinore), Matt Damon (The Odyssey), and John Malkovich (Wild Horse Nine) as locks, with Anthony Ippolito (I Play Rocky) and Robert Pattinson (Primetime) as rising threats; and conclude Cruise likely won't get nominated despite the showcase.
• Their final Cruise top ten (shared #1: Jerry Maguire) spans Risky Business, Mission Impossible, The Color of Money/Rain Man, Vanilla Sky, Top Gun/Maverick, Collateral, Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men, Eyes Wide Shut/Magnolia, built around the idea that Cruise is most compelling when filmmakers push him past his own matinee-idol beauty.

Notable moments

• "Let me just say right now, not a masterpiece... this is one of the most annoying movies I've ever seen."
• The reveal that the entire apocalyptic drama is a stage play being tech-rehearsed, confirmed when a tree falls and a stagehand appears in the background of a "window view."
• Digger's tribunal speech: "Oil is mother's milk... this is the gift that God has given us," delivered in a red velvet cowboy suit; described as his "You want me on that wall" Jack Nicholson moment.
• The quiet, wordless shift when Cruise and John Goodman step offstage and their bodies visibly relax; "there he is."
• Cruise's real-world daughter crisis resolving off-screen because the billionaire producer simply buys the outcome, undercutting the stakes of the play itself.
• A boardroom scene with an unfunny, overlong joke about no women being present is singled out as "the worst Coen brothers movie of all time."
• Sean's closing prediction: "This movie is ripe for a ten years later reclamation... there will be a cult to this movie."
• Debate over whether Cruise secretly wants this role to finally win him a competitive Oscar, following his honorary Oscar last year and three prior losses (Born on the Fourth of July, Jerry Maguire, Magnolia).

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