Tom Cruise must be the most divisive big star in Hollywood. For everyone who salutes him as the last old-school movie icon, who has brought joy to millions, even billions, worldwide over a 40-year career, there are others who sneer at his Scientology faith, his supposed weirdness and many of the pictures that he has made.  

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But his latest film Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is something else altogether, and a rare example of where a picture’s obvious flop status does not mean that it is an uninteresting piece of cinema. Quite the reverse. Although it opened to a pitiful $20 million worldwide – against a rumored budget of as much as $180 million – and will go down in history as one of the biggest commercial failures there has ever been, it is neither an out-and-out failure nor a much-misunderstood future classic. Instead, it is that rare Hollywood thing, a film of ideas, but the execution of those ideas leaves a very great deal to be desired.  

Expectations were high for the film when it was first announced. Iñárritu has specialized at taking big movie stars – Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Brad Pitt et al – and subverting their images on screen, often to Oscar-winning effect. Anyone who marveled at the epic sweep of The Revenant would have been excited at the prospect of the Mexican filmmaker directing Cruise in a thriller about the most........

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