A very good friend of mine who is a longtime director and writer went to a screening of Tom Cruise’s new movie, Digger, at the Director’s Guild headquarters in Hollywood yesterday.
When you’re a director and belong to the DGA, you get to see every movie for free at their plush on-site movie theater. My friend is a lifelong cinephile with an encyclopedic knowledge of movies, actors, and director techniques. He makes dramas and thrillers; he has excellent taste in movies and has a knack for predicting trends.
And like me, he absolutely loves Tom Cruise. We are kids of the 1980s, so of course we do.
But he walked out of Digger half way through it!
I wanted to share what he told me about it because I think it’s fascinating, and correct.
When I first saw the trailer, I was baffled. I think we all were.
Tom Cruise in more prosthetics? Was he trying to recapture the meme magic of his impersonation of producer Scott Rudin from Tropic Thunder? It just looked weird, and glaringly unfunny, and already reeked of leftie politics.
It’s one of the Warner Bros. legacy projects completed before David Ellison took control of Paramount Pictures and then Warner Bros., which explains how it happened.
I saw it and just immediately my heart sank.
And now, here is my friend’s review—I’ve never read one quite like it. Enjoy!:
An Anonymous Hollywood Insider’s Review of Digger
I just walked out of a special screening of Digger at the Directors Guild. It’s a woke, pretentious piece of garbage. I actually left about 40 minutes in and I’ve never walked out of a film at the DGA in my life, and Alejandro [Iñárritu, the director] was there! I once walked out of Brady Corbet’s Q&A for The Brutalist, but never once for a film.
And now that I’ve slept on it, I think Digger may be the worst film ever made.
