But instead of laughs, it has in-your-face overacting and a didactic disaster scenario. Cruise, under pounds of jowly make-up and thinning disheveled white hair, plays Digger Rockwell, an ancient Southern fossil-fuel titan who doesn’t just lord it over his company. He’s a man who rules the oil industry, and therefore rules America and maybe the world.
Cruise, declaiming every line, acting with blind bluster and a mean gleam of good-ol’-boy joy, makes Digger a walking cartoon — a larger-than-life satire of over-the-top American arrogance, like LBJ crossed with Foghorn Leghorn. The performance is very much of a piece with what Cruise did in his fat-suit cameo as the vulgarian studio executive Les Grossman in “Tropic Thunder.” At one point, Cruise wanted to make a Les Grossman movie, and in a certain way “Digger” is that movie — a chance for him to let it rip for two hours, to give the kind of stylized hambone performance that’s essentially a “Saturday Night Live” caricature, only executed with Method fullness. On its own terms, Cruise’s acting in “Digger” is well-played and skillfully etched.
It’s fun — or, theoretically, it should be — to see him cut loose. But the character of Les Grossman was a trivial showbiz lark. Iñárritu, the director of “Digger,” has more serious things on his mind.
The movie is set in a not-so-distant future, where Digger wakes up in a mansion that’s as much of a gilded bunker as Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. (He sleeps with his fluffy white cat, who’s in the process of dying and is, for some reason, played by a fake mechanical cat.) Right off, Digger receives an alarmed communication from his henchman in Greenland, where it seems that the oil exploration has hit a snag. There’s a crack in the ice, just a few feet wide, but it’s getting larger by the minute. Digger says it’s nothing to worry about.
His message is the same one he’s been running his company on for decades: Drill, baby, drill, and fuck the consequences. Only this time the consequences aren’t cooperating. Years of climate abuse, of reckless drilling at the ends of the earth, have unleashed a wave of methane, which in terms of environmental destruction makes carbon dioxide look like laughing gas.
An ice shelf, 400 miles wide, splits off from the glacier and starts floating toward Europe. It is set to collide with the continent and cause a tsunami, a mega-disaster, and mass death. Strangelove” of climate change.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
