What Do You Do with Tom Cruise? Not This.

I went to see the new Tom Cruise film, Digger, at a midweek matinee in Pasadena, expecting it to be a somewhat monastic experience. Still, I hadn’t imagined that I would comprise one-sixth of the audience, and one-half of it by the movie’s end. There are bad movies; there are always bad movies. But then there are the ones that make you want to carve a little circle around your chair and tunnel your way out.

Digger is a two-hour movie about climate change, apparently intended for an audience that has never heard of that particular plague. More specifically, it is an indictment of America’s involvement in that horror, and really of America itself. To borrow a formulation made famous by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright: It’s not a “God bless America” movie. It’s a “God damn America” movie.

Friends, we’ve lost Tom Cruise.