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........

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