Review: Tom Cruise destroys Earth in 'Digger,' a messy climate satire that occasionally strikes gold

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Set us as preferred Tom Cruise has dangled from cliffs, skyscrapers and planes, but oil magnate Digger Rockwell is his riskiest role in eons.He opens “Digger” lounging in a bed soaked with cat pee, tempting an elderly feline named Maggie to lick wet chow from his gnarled pinkie nail.

“Take a little taste for Daddy,” his grotesque billionaire coos.The cat resembles Nosferatu.Cruise’s twangy Texan doesn’t look much better.

Think a disinterred Ross Perot, hastily dusted off.After a decade of playing it safe with “Mission: Impossible” and “Top Gun” sequels, this is what it looks like when Hollywood’s last classic movie star finally sticks out his neck.Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Digger” is a bizarre stunt made on a big studio budget, a climate change satire that’s a self-conscious hybrid of Stanley Kubrick and Bertolt Brecht.

It’s bleak slapstick about how audiences should react to the end of civilization.The back-to-back best director Oscar winner of “Birdman” and “The Revenant” has always loved a showy gimmick, but here he puts his influences on bold display.

Slim Pickens yee-hawed riding “Dr.Strangelove’s” atomic bomb to oblivion; Cruise brandishes his grandpappy’s original shovel that struck crude in 1917 and whoops, “Oil is the mother’s milk of Earth!” You smirk at the audacity.Cruise’s Digger is the man most responsible for making a mess of the globe — and no other actor but him could have gotten a movie this messy greenlit for a $125 million budget.

Yet it’d be a mistake to judge “Digger” by the standards of a normal film.There are no emotions in it, only our own cold and cruel fears reflected back at us, as with a shot of Cruise standing defiantly in front of a mirror rimmed by antlers.

It’s about inertia and abdication, not solutions, and while I...