Tom Cruise’s Big Flop Is a Secret Masterpiece

Mr. Greene is the author of the novel “UnWorld.”

I didn’t want to see “Digger.” The trailers, in which Tom Cruise, in heavy old-man makeup, plays a cartoonish oil baron named Digger Rockwell, looked empty, grating, unfunny. What’s more, I already knew the film’s big twist, which has been widely spoiled, and which I will also spoil, below.

My premonition turned out to be well founded. The film has been roundly savaged as a critical and financial catastrophe, a soon-to-be legendary flop that will go down alongside Mr. Cruise’s biggest public missteps, like the couch jumping, the Matt Lauer interview and “Knight and........

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