Tom Cruise faces his age in Iñárritu’s Digger

ERR culture writer Kaspar Viilup says the autumn season has gathered pace so quickly that each work covered in his roundup leaves several others unmentioned. This edition looks at Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Digger and the adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s novel Verity.

Digger lets Tom Cruise confront his age

Already described as one of the biggest box-office failures of all time, Digger is a cinematic oddity that Viilup says has to be seen to be believed. Iñárritu, the Mexican director, persuaded Warner to back a meta-comedy that openly mocks the people moving through America’s corridors of business and power. Its setting is an eco-apocalyptic chaos in which the world is not merely burning but has already burned down.

Tom Cruise takes on a role that, Viilup writes, seems to match his age for the first time. But the writer doubts this means Cruise’s days of jumping off cliffs on a motorcycle are over.

The film’s foundations are not entirely new: Viilup sees echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin. Iñárritu has previously explored the boundaries between reality and performance in Birdman; here, the focus is a global farce rather than one actor’s personal transformation.

Viilup says the film throws out more ideas than it can develop, with many failing to contribute to the bigger picture. But he argues that its willingness to take risks keeps it alive and energetic. He recommends going to see it with few expectations, describing it as an unexpected punch to the gut alongside the “warm air” of powerful figures. He also gives it a special mention as perhaps the year’s best cat film.

Verity looks like a cash-grab

Viilup describes the recently released Verity as a straightforward cash-grab. Film adaptations of Colleen Hoover’s novels have generally done at least reasonably well at the box office, he writes, so producers may have assumed they would not need to work especially hard to draw audiences.

The film brings together director Michael Showalter, whose The Eyes of Tammy Faye won at the Oscars, Oscar-winning composer Hauschka and Josh Hartnett, who is enjoying a second wave in his acting career.