Digger review: Tom Cruise takes the 'biggest risk of his career' in this 'love-it-or-hate-it' folly ★★★★☆

Tom Cruise's performance as a bizarre oil tycoon makes Digger the "weirdest film" he has ever made – and could it be a flop. But there's much more to this divisive, satirical comedy than viewers might expect, including two high-concept twists.

Tom Cruise does things that seem terrifying to the rest of us, whether it's clinging to the sides of planes or riding motorbikes off the tops of cliffs. But his new film is the biggest risk of his career. He isn't in danger of breaking any bones, for a change, but he is in danger of being called pretentious and self-indulgent – as well as being associated with what could well be a humungous flop.

Directed and co-written by Alejandro G Iñárritu, the Mexican director of Amores Perros, Birdman and The Revenant, Digger isn't just the weirdest film Cruise has ever made, it's the weirdest film that almost anyone has ever made.

Most people won't go to see it – and some people who do will walk out halfway through. But that doesn't mean that Digger is a failure. It's just that it's a bizarre, hectoring, conceptually challenging eco-satire, so it's not likely to be mistaken for Mission: Impossible.

The first way in which it departs from Cruise's recent work is that his character, Digger Rockwell, isn't an athletic, ageless, roguish-yet-noble hero. With a mountain of prosthetic make-up, and someone listed in the end credits as "T Cruise's hair artist", the actor has transformed himself into a balding, greying, paunchy Texan oil baron. And we get to see just how paunchy he is when he is shown in his underwear in a cheeky homage to one of Cruise's breakthrough films, Risky Business.

It's the kind of extreme makeover that is amusing in small doses – such as when Cruise cameoed as the monstrous Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder – but for the main character to look so jarringly strange is quite a choice.

Still, nothing in Digger is subtle. Rockwell's historic mansion is decorated with more stuffed exotic animals than a Victorian natural history museum, but (irony!) he's deeply worried about the health of his scrawny pet cat. He has some feelings, then: he's also fond of his half-sister, a green-energy entrepreneur played by a gravely under-used Sandra Hüller. But this swaggering mogul doesn't care about anything except money – and he cares about the environment least of all.

When an underling calls Rockwell to say that his company's oil-drilling operation in Alaska has cracked a glacier in two, he responds by feigning ignorance, laughing off the problem, ranting about all the jobs he's created, and furiously passing the buck.

But reality hits when an iceberg the size of a small country splits from the glacier and starts drifting towards northern Europe. In a matter of days, a tsunami will put several major cities under water.

The blowhard US president, played by John Goodman, convenes an emergency meeting in Rockwell's mansion, so a dozen white men in suits and military uniforms are soon sitting around a table, shouting and swearing (there's a nice joke about the absence of women in the room).

A scientist, played with heartfelt distress by the excellent Riz Ahmed, struggles to get them to understand the situation, but eventually they settle on a plan. They will use their military might to change the iceberg's direction. And if that doesn't work, maybe they will take control of the narrative so that a US company isn't blamed for the subsequent devastation. The main thing, the president's religious adviser assures them, is that God is on their side.

What's fascinating about the scenario is that it would have seemed embarrassingly over-the-top a few years ago, but now seems as plausible as a documentary. The iceberg story is appalling, but it could fit next to any article about El Niño.

Judged purely a satire, then, Digger is powerfully resonant. But there is more to it than that. The film has two high-concept twists which raise new questions about everything you've seen so far. I won't reveal any more. All I'll say is that the first full-length trailer looked so exaggerated and artificial that some people wondered if Iñárritu had actually made a musical. The truth is even more surprising.

Iñárritu is a multiple Oscar-winner, and Leonardo DiCaprio won his Oscar for starring in The Revenant, so some commentators (me included) assumed that the project was a blatant attempt by Cruise to bag one for himself. (Aside from being given an honorary Oscar at last year's Governors Awards, he has never won anything on the big night.)

But Digger puts paid to that theory. If Cruise was driven to win prizes, he wouldn't have made a film as eccentric or as politically blunt as this one. 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.

Personally, I loved it. Some of its excesses are, well, a bit too excessive, and most viewers will wish it was shorter. After about 90 minutes, you get tired of close-ups of Goodman yelling while snake-sized veins bulge out of his forehead. But when Cruise is clambering all over the set, delivering thunderous lectures on the oil industry, I couldn't help grinning at the gargantuan scale of his performance, the conviction of the script's grim environmental message, and Iñárritu's antic style.

If this art-house extravaganza had featured an actor known for left-field indie films, it would have been lauded as a daring experiment. But as it features the actor at the very top of Hollywood's A-list, many viewers will wonder what he was thinking.

But you have to hand it to Cruise. When he's making an action blockbuster, he wants it to showcase the most outrageous stunts ever seen. And when he's making an oddball apocalyptic tragicomedy, he goes for it with the same limitless, daredevil ambition.

★★★★☆ 

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