Tom Cruise has been at the top of the movie industry for over 40 years, starting with “Risky Business” (1983) and “Top Gun” (1986), followed by the Mission: Impossible franchise that started in 1996 and now includes eight movies, making Tom Cruise by far the greatest movie stuntman of all time.
Cruise has been nominated for three Oscars, including “Born on the Fourth of July” (1988), “Jerry Maguire” (1996), and “Magnolia” (1999). For reasons unknown, Tom Cruise was not even nominated for his outstanding performance as a Navy Lawyer in “A Few Good Men” (1992). In my opinion, Cruise deserved at least 2 Oscars for these performances, but now, at age 64, he has never won an Oscar.
The buzz about the new movie “Digger” was that it would, once and for all, showcase Cruise’s acting ability and finally win him that elusive Oscar. The truth about the movie Digger is that it does show three outstanding acting performances by John Goodman, Riz Ahmed, and Tom Cruise, but the movie itself is such a nightmare of insane ideas, creepy scenes, and a completely illogical story that it is likely that none of these actors will be nominated for anything. It is close to impossible to win an Academy Award for a movie that has been panned by critics — Rotten Tomatoes is a very low 51%.
Digger was written by three screenwriters; another reason for the disconnected, insane story is that it might suggest that none of these writers actually collaborated while writing this disaster of a movie. It is hard to understand, given that the goal was to give Tom Cruise a great chance of winning an Oscar, that this screenplay was chosen, considering how crazy and insane the whole idea behind this story is.
Tom Cruise is Rockwell, the CEO of an oil company with rigs working in Greenland. Unfortunately, there are leaks that have been known about for some time and ignored, which cause a huge iceberg to break off and head towards Europe. At this point in the story, everything was normal and looked to be a good message story about Global Warming; then, about 25% in, the film took a giant leap into a crazy direction that seemed entirely about being different and had nothing to do with creating an interesting, coherent movie. The critics are as harsh as I have ever seen: Odie Henderson — The Boston Globe — ZERO STARS “this egocentric piece of s***.” It is worth noting that Henderson isn’t merely saying the movie is bad—he put it in the extremely rare zero-star category.
Considering some scenes of great acting with Cruise, Goodman, and Ahmed, the mistake of turning this good story into a crazy, off-the-wall idea is somewhat tragic, when you remember that the entire point was to give Tom Cruise his shot at winning an Academy Award. They all got the acting part right, but forgot to write a real movie with a message.
