Broadly delivered satire buries 'Digger'

Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Digger dances on the knife’s edge between farce, satire, physical comedy, environmental pleading, and silliness, all sketched in broad comic strokes that border on self-parody. An unrecognizable Tom Cruise portrays a bloviating oil baron who dwarfs the other characters, turning them into padding that fills an over-stuffed movie that proves heavy-handed as it evokes memories of better out-sized satires. Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Dr. Strangelove comes to mind. Cruise's Digger Rockwell finds himself mired in an environmental crisis. One of his Greenland rigs has unleashed a massive chunk of ice that will flood Europe, leaving multitudes dead in its wake. Deeply hidden by a major application of prosthetics, Cruise puts on a show, igniting an outburst of ego, crudeness, and boisterous behavior; Digger becomes a grotesque absurdity, a bully devoted to the aging, incontinent cat that shares his bed. As you might guess, Digger allows Cruise to pull out…