Imagine the most ridiculous uber-wealthy person alive. Maybe he’s a little rotund, his expensive silk pajamas barely hiding his protruding paunch. Maybe he wakes up in a mansion filled with gaudy antiques and monuments to his greatness, and is perpetually followed by a housemaid who silently shuffles behind him, cleaning up the mess that he carelessly leaves in his loud, obnoxious wake. Maybe his double chin wobbles in anger while he berates the staff of his oil rig for interrupting his daily calls with the most important people around the world — cracks in some iceberg be damned.But in Digger, you don’t have to imagine, because Tom Cruise’s Digger Rockwell, an oil tycoon who becomes responsible for a climate disaster that could destroy the world, is the most odious, self-centered caricature of a wealthy gazillionaire possible. In fact, imagination is pretty much thrown out the window and left for dead in Alejandro Iñárritu’s apocalyptic black comedy — and I mean apocalyptic in both senses of the word. Digger, like the impending climate catastrophe it depicts, is also a bit of a disaster, though that’s part of the intention of the movie. It’s almost designed to be polarizing, Digger’s first half playing like an endurance test of how long you can listen to men yelling incessantly, while the second half lays out a winking metatextual explanation for why we watched men yell for an hour. It would be a clever, compelling rug-pull, if it all weren’t so smug.Iñárritu co-writes the script for Digger with Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris Jr., and Nicolás Giacobone, from a story by Iñárritu, Berman, and Jez Butterworth. It’s a crowded group of voices behind the story, which lends to the film’s cacophonous tone. From the start of the film — which begins with a cheeky “curtains up” of Digger’s bedroom window curtains — Digger barrels through its plot at a relentless, manic pace. After a busy morning of swanning around his gaudy mansion, taking calls and caring for his half-dead cat, Digger reluctantly receives a call from the staff at his Arctic oil rig, who warn of cracks in the surrounding icebergs caused by methane that leaked from Digger’s rigs.Annoyed at their suggestions of shutting down his rig, Digger hangs up, only to learn that mere minutes later, the rig had exploded, and an iceberg the size of a small city was headed right for Europe. He’s delivered this news by Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), his constantly frazzled head of environmental research, and the movie’s sole source of moral righteousness. This becomes an unlikely boon, as the film soon descends into an endless cycle of such systemic and pervasive evil that even its most incisive political commentary starts to feel tedious.The thing about satire is that it’s supposed to be funny. And nothing about Digger’s story of the most powerful men in the world scrambling to save their assets while the Earth is on the verge of ending plays out even like a particularly good joke. Sure, they’re all cartoonish buffoons — Cruise’s Digger the ringleader of all of them, both textually and performance-wise. Cruise calls on the spirit of his Jerry Maguire performance to inject a sense of smarmy charm into Digger Rockwell, though it feels like his natural charisma and the movie’s indecision on whether to humanize Digger or paint him as a cartoon villain, clash. Digger even gives a Gordon Gekko-like “greed is good”-style monologue which is greeted with jeers and boos from his audience, but painted as amusing by the film because of Cruise’s outlandish circus-act attitude while giving it.Riz Ahmed’s Ganesh is a standout in the film. | Warner Bros.But if Cruise were over-the-top, the rest of the cast goes completely overboard with their archetypes: Sandra Huller is Digger’s tightly-wound half-sister and business partner; John Goodman plays the President of the United States like a (very familiar) braggadocious dictator; Michael Stuhlbarg is his simpering Vice President; and Robert John Burke plays a military man so meatheaded it seems a miracle that he functions.Then, there’s the absurdist metatextual reveal that happens shortly into the first act, which reveals a second character that Cruise plays, and a whole cast of others “behind the curtain.” But none of these characters transcend archetype either, with only Ahmed’s Ganesh displaying a glimmer of the humanity that the film purports to comment on.The reveal does lend a modicum of depth to Digger. It even gives itself a little bit of grace by laying out that everything, from its insufferable tone and cartoonish caricatures, was by design. Even the drab colors — which look even more washed-out and artificial in the 35mm VistaVision format that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki shot on — are intentional. But intention does not necessarily make something better. And whatever cutting commentary Digger may have about the evils of late-stage capitalism, or men in power, is kneecapped by the fact that it doesn’t know what it wants to say.Digger opens in theaters October 2.