Talk about a blunt instrument! Mining through the rubble of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s meta satire Digger (D+) produces a few inspired treasures while largely burying its thesis beneath too many allegorical characters and too much self-satisfied artifice. Ostensibly an arty star vehicle for Tom Cruise, playing an out-of-touch billionaire oil tycoon whose willful blindness to the consequences of his policies collides with a real-time climate crisis, the film is rarely as interesting as it thinks it is. Wisely, Iñárritu creates at least one character who registers as more than a caricature: Riz Ahmed’s science advisor, whose attempts to speak truth to power provide some of the movie’s most authentic moments. Others range from understated and underdeveloped, including Sandra Hüller as a green-minded entrepreneur, to deliriously over the top, with John Goodman cranking his agitated POTUS well past eleven. What begins at a tonal decibel barely registering soon gets amplified to merciless levels, turning Iñárritu into the Boy Who Cried Wolf in multiple milieus for two punishing hours. Buried somewhere in the permafrost of the parody is an impulse so mistrustful of its audience that virtually every trick gets hurled against the VistaVisionary wall in hopes that something will stick. Cruise, to his credit, finds flashes of subversive authenticity beneath the pancaked prosthetics, occasionally suggesting a more interesting movie struggling to burrow itself out. The film aspires to Dr. Strangelove and barely surpasses Toys. But the film’s insistent calliope condemning intentionally destructive acts against the planet loses its potency remarkably quickly. For all its potentially benevolent “save the earth” intentions, the filmmakers muddy and muddle their point with a continuous cavalcade of plot and production design conventions. Their fussy film ultimately comes up embarrassingly shallow.