For the better part of a year, the new Tom Cruise movie Digger has been sold on what is more or less a lie. The simple logline for a movie wouldn’t normally be worth quoting, but this one is notable for how the movie itself never really touches it. It’s supposedly about Cruise’s character Digger Rockwell as he “embarks on a frantic mission to prove that he is humanity’s savior before the disaster he’s unleashed destroys everything.” This sounds like a dark-comic flipside to Cruise’s work in the Mission: Impossible franchise, which ballooned from slick TV series remake to Cruise-and-director playground to, in its final installments, movies perhaps overly enraptured with the messianic can-do/will-do spirit of their death-defying star.

In a sense, Digger is actually that: Dark Ethan Hunt, more concerned with the glory of his own money than the fate of the world. As such, the character never really goes on a “frantic mission” (possible or not) to save humanity. Digger Rockwell is an ultra-powerful billionaire who looks much closer to a man of Cruise’s actual age (64) than the real-life star, and carries himself with a different form of swagger, trading in that intense sprint for a kind of loping cowboy walk. He speaks with a down-home Texas-sized accent and Coens-ish elocution (he even say “we’re in a tight spot” at one point, Clooney-style!), fawns over his pet cat as she hovers near death’s door, and showboats as loud as Cruise can, never lowering to his trademark menacing evenness.

Digger does indeed unleash a disaster with his oil rigs, which send a massive crack zig-zagging through the ice shelf, triggering a series of not-quite-natural disasters that put him in the hot seat with the president (John Goodman) and his administration composed primarily of cowardly yes-men (variously played by the somewhat overqualified likes of Riz Ahmed and Michael Stuhlbarg). It’s telling that the administration’s response to Digger’s abuse of power is to essentially codify that power, allowing him to sit in on cabinet meetings and crucial decisions, despite not really having much of a plan. He’s got ideas about the “narrative,” all right, and what might realistically be done in the face of catastrophe, but his hubris doesn’t include a Cruise-style harebrained scheme to save everyone. He doesn’t seem especially eager to prove much of anything besides that he was, in some roundabout way, never wrong to doom the world.

This makes Digger something of an inaction comedy: a dark parable about powerful men who refuse to do the right thing for most of their lives, and then decide there’s no need to start doing it once they reap for the rest of the world what they’ve sown for themselves. It’s the brainchild of director/cowriter Alejandro González Iñárritu, who lured Cruise into his first non-thriller role in years; given that actor/filmmaker combo, it reads on paper like a bid to win Cruise an Oscar, or at least his first nomination in ages. It worked for Leonardo DiCaprio, who won his Academy Award for Iñárritu’s The Revenant, and for Michael Keaton, who scored his first-ever nomination for Iñárritu’s Birdman.

I’m not sure if it will work quite the same here — ironically, for reasons that a) actually deepen and complicate Cruise’s performance and b) cannot be readily discussed without spoiling a major turn, not really hinted at in any of the trailers (or, certainly, the half-fake logline). Let’s just say there’s another side to Cruise’s work in Digger, one involving less showboating, that manages to increase his performance’s scope while arguably decreasing its depth. In many of the splashiest scenes, he grabs the spotlight to rant or rave, yet the overall effect of the movie is to make one of the world’s most singular movie stars part of an ensemble again. But unlike in Magnolia — his last acting nomination, a quarter-century ago — where a different form of showboating collapsed into devastating emotion. In Digger, Iñárritu keeps the characters at distorted, satirical arm’s length, with his low-angle and fish-eyed shots — and then with a twist, adds another couple of arms in there to push the action further away from the audience.

There’s a little bit of intimacy it gains in the tradeoff, but it seems meager by comparison. It’s the damnedest thing, the way the movie satirizes the pitch-black environmental devastation we’ve been unleashing on the world, then seems aghast at how little satire can move the needle. It’s a worthy subject; if only it didn’t feel, at times, like a whole movie responding to the fact that not everyone thought Adam McKay’s flat-footed doomsday comedy Don’t Look Up was very good. Is Digger funnier than that movie? Maybe, slightly, purely because of Cruise’s gusto. But it’s in the same ballpark of laughs scattered to the apocalyptic winds.

And yet, in a sense, Digger still demands to be seen on a big screen, maybe even with the kind of arrogance that allows Digger to demand a seat at the table even after he’s essentially destroyed it. Iñárritu shot the movie in VistaVision, a taller format previously used on One Battle After Another, which also means that its image will fill an extra-tall old-fashioned IMAX screen (although — speaking of extinction — there aren’t more than a few dozen of those available to show it that way). I haven’t seen it in that format, but the movie is a truly theatrical, presentational experience that probably won’t play as well at home. Cruise, of course, is a big-screen fixture, and the wildest thing about Digger — or at least the wildest thing that we didn’t already know in our hearts, whether or not we’re doing anything about it — is how it’s able to elicit such a big, bold performance from such a big, bold star, project it on a big, bold screen, and then still somehow cut Tom Cruise back down to size.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.