Tom Cruise trades stunts for satire as toxic tycoon 'Digger'

Tom Cruise has taken on one of his riskiest roles in decades, tackling the politics of climate change and corporate greed in new film "Digger" which was savaged by some critics on Tuesday.

Backed by a reported budget of $130 million and an advertising blitz, the dark comedy from multi-Oscar-winning Mexican auteur Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu hits screens from Wednesday.

Taking a break from his usual action movie roles, Cruise is barely recognisable as a mining and oil magnate facing an environmental crisis -- with the original screenplay seeing him wrestle with his own conscience and critics of his wealth and business.

"It is the culmination of all my skills," Cruise, 64, told GQ magazine earlier this month. "It's the most challenging character ever."

After the premiere in London on September 22, initial reaction online was mixed, suggesting the melodramatic performances and Inarritu's acidic parodying of the billionaire class and climate change campaigning were likely to divide audiences.

Full reviews published on Tuesday trended negative, with the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes giving it a low 53 percent rating overall.

"Rather than being a crowd-pleasing prestige picture, it's a love-it-or-hate-it folly - and there probably will be more people in the 'hate it' camp than the 'love it' one," noted the BBC in a review that gave it four out of five stars.

Other critics praised Cruise's acting as "a head-spinning performance for the ages" (Deadline), but Hollywood industry magazines Variety and The Hollywood Reporter scorched the project as "a ponderous absurdist lecture" and "a shallow satire".

"Digger is basically what happens when you put two outsize egos together with nobody holding the reins to keep their most self-indulgent impulses in check," The Hollywood Reporter review stated, referring to Inarritu and Cruise.

- 'Serious' role -

Cruise has spent most of this century doing action movies, above all as Ethan Hunt in the eight-film "Mission: Impossible" series as well as in the Top Gun sequel "Top Gun: Maverick", or the "Jack Reacher" films.

He will appear in another sequel, a "Days of Thunder" follow-up, later this year.

For film critic and author A.S Hamrah, who has written extensively about Cruise's body of work, the last roles that harnessed the full range of his skills date back to the 1990s.

"I think Tom Cruise is looking back on his career and realising he's ageing and that, on the one hand, he still has to do things like 'Top Gun II' and 'Days of Thunder II', but on the other he hasn't really been in any serious film since 1999," he told AFP.

That was the year of "Magnolia" by Paul Thomas Anderson, as well as "Eyes Wide Shut" by Stanley Kubrick in which Cruise acted opposite Nicole Kidman, his ex-wife.

"I also think he's also probably thinking now that there's people he has not worked with that he would like to work with, and probably Inarritu is one of them," Hamrah added, referring to the acclaimed director of "Amores Perros" and "The Revenant".

- Awards season player? -

Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at cinema ticket seller Fandango and the founder of consultancy Box Office Theory, told AFP that Cruise's decades in Hollywood demonstrated he is willing to head outside his comfort zone at times.

"Younger audiences may associate him with being a risky stunt performer and actor, but he's always prepared to go outside the box," he said, referring to his roles in movies such as "Vanilla Sky" (2001) or "Jerry Maguire" (1996).

"We have to put Digger in a separate category from the typical Tom Cruise blockbuster. It's something all of its own," he added.

One interesting ponderable is the extent to which Cruise may personally embrace the political messages of "Digger": about our unsustainable lifestyles, virtue-signalling consumer behaviour and hypocritical politicians.

"I think that like Leonardo DiCaprio, I think he's concerned about climate change and the environment," Hamrah, author of "Last Week in End Times Cinema" and critic at n+1 magazine, told AFP.

Might it also be a role that gives Cruise a shot at an elusive Oscar for best actor, with his memorable 10-minute monologue in the middle of the film one of its strongest moments?

"It could be an awards season player," Robbins said.