Review: 'Digger' tries to make satire out of the climate crisis, with Tom Cruise pushing hard but not bringing any comedy to the project.

Well into the cosmic misfire that is “Digger,” there’s a moment where a character, played by Sophia Wilde, is yelling at the character played by star Tom Cruise that what they’re doing is satire — and that satire is supposed to be funny.

This moment suggests that director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu has crossed over into that Netflix parody of moviemaking, where characters have to shout the movie’s most basic points to the audience, who may be folding the laundry or looking at their phones. 

One could say the same of a scene earlier in this humorless attempt at satire, where the President (John Goodman) tells Cruise’s character, oilman Digger Rockwell, that he’s dying of “cancer of the asshole.” Certainly something has ventured up someone’s sphincter in this movie, though I firmly believe it was Cruise and his director.

When the movie starts, we see Cruise as Digger, arguably the richest and most powerful man on Earth, indulging in typical rich-person behaviors — like tending to his cat, who’s infirm to the point of immobility and would be heading for that big scratching post in the sky if Digger would listen to his veterinarian’s diagnosis.

Digger clearly thinks he’s smarter than all of his experts, whether it’s the vet or the researcher at the Rockwell company’s drilling station off the coast of Greenland. Digger’s main expert, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), learns that seconds after Digger finished that call, an explosion of methane from underground destroyed the drilling station and caused a massive ice shelf to break off and start floating toward Europe.

Digger meets the President and the cabinet to explore options, including hoping the ice shelf will steer clear of Europe, worrying that it will cause a tsunami that will kill hundreds of thousands, or nuking the thing into smaller icebergs. Digger decides he has to take charge, so he can stop the climate catastrophe that he knows he started.

The movie soon takes a sharp left turn, which I will not describe in case everything I’ve said so far about this misbegotten movie didn’t impress you and you still want to watch it for yourself. 

What you’ll see is a self-important attempt at satirizing the climate crisis and the indifference of powerful men. (The only woman approaching a level of power is Digger’s sister, a renewable-energy CEO played by Sandra Hüller.) The script — credited to Gonzalez Iñárritu and three other writers — is too literal to be funny and too outlandish to be anything else. It makes the 2021 climate comedy “Don’t Look Up” look like the laugh riot only its producers thought it was.

It’s tempting to credit Cruise with trying something different, for being willing to stretch beyond his action-movie stardom. The problem is that Cruise acts like all this humor-free ridiculousness is imparting a deeper message, when the chaos he and Gonzalez Iñárritu are stirring up destroy all attempts to give the movie a serious edge.

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‘Digger’ 

★1/2

Opens Friday, October 2, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for pervasive language. Running time: 129 minutes.