Review: ‘Digger’ is unapologetically willing to be hated

I have a strange compliment for “Digger.”

I think a lot of people are going to hate it. And I mean that as a compliment.

That probably requires some explanation.

There are bad movies people hate because, well, they’re bad. They’re boring, poorly made, badly acted, or simply don’t work.

Then there are movies people hate because they make very specific choices and refuse to apologize for them.

“Digger” is that kind of movie.

This is a strange movie. It’s absurd, uncomfortable, funny, occasionally confusing, and operating on a wavelength that will either suck you in or have you checking your watch, wondering how much longer you have to endure this nonsense.

I was completely sucked in.

But here’s what I loved almost as much as the movie itself: “Digger” doesn’t seem particularly concerned about winning you over.

It knows exactly what it wants to be, and it’s unapologetically willing to be hated for it.

There’s something refreshing about taking a big swing

I’ve been reviewing movies for a long time, and some are much easier to recommend than others.

Recommending something like “Top Gun: Maverick” is easy. It’s a crowd-pleasing blockbuster with great action, likable characters, and a story built to have you walking out of the theater with a smile on your face.

Recommending “Digger” feels a little more like telling someone about a restaurant where I had one of the best meals of my life while knowing there’s a decent chance they’re going to call me afterward and ask why I sent them there knowing they had a dairy allergy or hated brussels sprouts.

That’s a little scary when your job is literally recommending movies to people.

But I also kind of love it.

“Digger” takes enormous swings. Its performances are big. Its sets are bizarre. Its humor can be absurd. Its tone changes constantly. At times, reality itself seems to be more of a suggestion than a rule.

And the movie commits to all of it.

That’s important because being weird isn’t the same thing as being good.

We’ve all seen movies that desperately want you to know how quirky they are. Being confusing doesn’t automatically make something profound. Making an unusual choice isn’t impressive simply because nobody else thought to do it.

The choices still have to work.

For me, they worked in “Digger” because everyone involved seems completely committed to making the same strange movie.

Tom Cruise goes all in

Nowhere is that commitment more obvious than in Tom Cruise.

Cruise has spent so much of the last couple of decades reminding us that he is one of the greatest movie stars alive that it’s easy to forget he’s also an incredibly talented actor.

“Digger” won’t let you forget.

Cruise plays a larger-than-life character at the center of a story I’m intentionally not going to explain much. The less you know going in, the better.

What I will say is that Cruise is asked to do a lot.

He gets loud, ridiculous, vulnerable, funny, and heartbreaking. Sometimes he seems like the biggest person in the room, and other times he looks like a scared little boy who has absolutely no idea what he’s supposed to do next.

Then there’s a monologue that runs close to 10 minutes and requires far more than simply memorizing a bunch of lines.

There’s physicality, choreography, comic timing, and huge emotional shifts. Cruise has to control it all while making the scene feel natural.

I don’t know how he did it.

It’s the kind of performance that could have gone very wrong if Cruise had held back even a little. Instead, he goes for it.

So does everyone else.

Riz Ahmed is fantastic. John Goodman seems perfectly comfortable living inside this bizarre world, and Jesse Plemons continues his habit of making everything he’s in more interesting.

Nobody seems embarrassed by the movie they’re making.

That may sound like a strange compliment, but I think it’s one of the reasons “Digger” works.

Nobody is winking at the audience.

Nobody is standing off to the side saying, “Don’t worry, I know this is weird too.” They all commited and they got me to commit as well.

The weirdness isn’t the point

For all I’ve talked about how strange “Digger” is, that’s not really why I liked it.

I liked it because, underneath all that weirdness, there’s a movie that kept me curious.

I wanted to know what was happening. I wanted to know why it was happening. And as the movie began to reveal more of itself, I wanted to see where it was taking me.

There’s a satirical story underneath everything that I don’t want to spoil, and the script is much more deliberate than it initially appears.

The production design is incredible. The humor landed for me. The performances are phenomenal, and the movie finds some surprisingly emotional moments amid all the insanity.

There is a purpose behind the weirdness, and that’s the difference.

“Digger” isn’t throwing random things at the screen, hoping you’ll mistake unpredictability for creativity. It has something it wants to do and a very specific way it wants to do it.

Whether you like what it’s doing is a completely different question.

You might hate it

I realize this isn’t exactly the strongest sales pitch.

“Hey, there’s this new movie I loved. You might absolutely hate it. Want to go?”

But I don’t think every movie needs to be for everyone.

And I definitely don’t mean that in the annoying, “You just didn’t understand it” way.

You can understand “Digger” perfectly and hate it.

You might find the humor irritating. You might think the performances are too big. You might get frustrated by its rhythms or decide its satire doesn’t work.

You may walk out wondering what in the world I saw in this thing.

That’s OK.

Movies are strange that way.

We can sit in the same theater, watch the same images on the same screen, hear the same dialogue, and walk away having had completely different experiences.

I love that about movies.

There’s no mathematical formula that says if a movie has good acting, strong production design, and an interesting story, everyone is required to like it. Sometimes something just connects with you. Sometimes it doesn’t. And every once in a while, you find something that’s exactly your kind of weird.

“Digger” was my kind of weird.

I loved that it took big swings. I loved that Tom Cruise gave himself completely to this bizarre character. I loved that the movie kept surprising me, making me laugh, and occasionally making me wonder what in the world I was watching.

Most of all, I loved that it never seemed to stop to ask whether everyone would like it. It just went for it.

I don’t know if you’re going to love “Digger” or if you’re going to hate it.

I am confident, however, that no one will be standing somewhere in the middle when the credits roll.