Two-time Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali trained for years to swing a sword onscreen as the MCU's new incarnation of vampire hunter Blade. Yet, as film fans know by now, the studio wasted that man's time, while certainly adding to his bank account, with no Blade feature ever coming to fruition. And it never will with Ali, he's declared, understandably ready to keep it moving.
Fortunately, from the ashes of the scuttled project -- and half a decade of Ali developing a Blade film alongside Mogul Mowgli writer-director Bassam Tariq -- a new hero has arisen in their gripping collaboration Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.
Alejandro Iñárritu's rambling satire Digger is a woolly mess of a film, though admirable in its ambition. Few modern movies aiming to reheat Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove recipe of doomsday dread, political satire, and broad absurdist comedy come as close to the Kubrickian ideal as Digger does in fits and starts.
Digger likewise plants us beside the President of the United States (John Goodman) and members of his cabinet cartoonishly fighting in the war room over what to do to avert an imminent disaster. Here, the threat's not an atomic bomb, but rather an American-made climate catastrophe that could wipe out thousands, maybe millions of lives.
