ENTERTAINMENT DESK

IF YOU THINK that the revelation that Tom Cruise’s new movie, Digger, turns out to be a play about the central character, is a twist, then you’ve been going to far too many superhero and franchise films and are a member of a growing dumbocracy spreading across the Western World.

Digger made me laugh out loud. Cruise, Goodman, Ahmed and Plemons are all memorable and the film is a chaotic laugh at humanity’s car crash by people looking in the rear view mirror. The cat is hilarious, both as pet and metaphor. No, a metaphor is not a drug.

At times, the plot occasionally trips as it balances between character and caricature; the message, that humans are greedy and hypocritical in equal amounts, is not subtle; but the truth of it excuses any failings. And the satire is not for us, it is for an audience living in a future dystopia, who already know the consequences. They need a laugh before putting on their breathing masks.

Curiously, Tom Cruise’s own more recent history of franchise action movies may have contributed to this film’s failure to find a significant audience at the box office. In a way, Mr Cruise is his own Digger. That’s irony for those who have had it surgically removed.

Surgery aside, this film can probably never find an audience among the Gen Zers who are America’s primary cinema going public; they will need another thirty years and several intelligence and humor transplants to appreciate it.

It should, however, slowly pick up audiences by streaming, and on DVDs and whatever. It might become an underground secret, passed between people in dark doorways. It could even join that long list of box office failures that turned out to be classics.

Hopefully, what it foretells will not come to pass.

Still, the cat has a great future, even if the world the movie describes, does not.

And remember, whatever does happen to humanity, we are all to blame.