Review

Culture

Film & TV

30 May 2025

4 min read

Ethan Hunt is MI Jesus, and it’s ridiculous

The final instalment of Mission Impossible warns about AI, yet plays out as if written by a chatbot.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

Tom Cruise playing Ethan Hunt in an open necked shirt looks perplexed.

Tom Cruise in action.

Is this the FINAL reckoning? I’m not sure. I hope so. There has been speculation whether Tom Cruise will reprise his role as Ethan Hunt in further franchise instalments. He has expressed interest, while also suggesting that the use of the word ‘final’ is purposeful and indicative. Let us all pray that he’s being honest. I mean…he must be exhausted. The stress and strain, the pressure and pain, that he puts his body through for every Mission Impossible film is approaching elder abuse – he is 62 after all.

In a departure from tradition, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning is an immediate sequel to Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, which released in 2023. The series which has thrived on a formula of releasing stand-alone spy stories, allowing us to enjoy familiar characters in new scenarios, has decided to make a two-parter…although you wouldn’t know it. You don’t need to have seen Dead Reckoning to pay your money to watch Final Reckoning, as the script assumes you’ve not only missed the immediate prequel, but have never viewed any other Mission Impossible film.

Goodness me, the film is plodding. It begins with a message from the President (Angela Bassett), delivered to Cruise’s super-spy Hunt. In previous instalments such messages have been a punchy way to set the stakes, roll the pitch, and then give the rest of the screen time over to remarkable action set-pieces. On this occasion we have an interminably long, and irritatingly portentous, monologue detailing why Ethan Hunt is the best of spies, the best of men, and essentially MI Jesus. The only man who can save the world from a literal apocalypse.

The premise of the film is that the malevolent, power-hungry AI known as ‘The Entity’ (could no one have thought of a better name, REALLY!?), which Hunt failed to stop in the previous film, is now at large and tipping the world towards destruction. It is manipulating the media, gaslighting governments, and slowly infiltrating the nuclear arsenals of the world, all in preparation to annihilate most of the human race in a nuclear holocaust. It then plans to rule the remaining vestiges of humanity and create a new utopia for itself. Only Ethan Hunt can stop it…just as long as he convinces world leaders to trust him, finds the nuclear submarine where ‘The Entity’ originated, defeats hundreds of bad guys, and infiltrates a top-secret bunker in South Africa.

We’re a world away from the lean and mean story of the first MI, where we only had the identities of CIA assets at stake!

Its rubbish. Genuinely rubbish.

The script is ripe. Nay! It is overripe. NAY! Burn the whole house down, because the brie has grown limbs and the fruit bowl is plotting your death. Every other conversation involves either Cruise pontificating on how the only way to defeat ‘The Entity’ is love and trust and the age of Aquarius, or someone explaining to Cruise how this mission is his destiny, because only he is good and pure enough to succeed. He’s MI Jesus, and it’s ridiculous.

The film plods and plods and plods. The whole point of this franchise is to provide the viewer with regular, breath-taking action, and yet the first hour-plus is a litany of exposition and call-backs. Ethan travels to several European capitals, for about thirty seconds apiece, before formulating his plan. This is confusing and jarring, but to add to this pain, the audience is tortured with disorienting, quick-cut montages of Hunt’s previous adventures. The plot seems to be determined to link this final, world-ending catastrophe to his past escapades…except MI2…no one has love for that.

Unfortunately, all these positives are packaged in such a self-aggrandising and cack-handed manner as to be rendered inert.

By the time the action really kicks in I was exhausted and in no mood. This is a shame, because the action is truly spectacular. A long sequence in a submarine – which is both well below safe diving depth, but is also slowly falling of an underwater cliff. A breath-taking fight between two biplanes. Gunfire galore. I recognised its brilliance on an intellectual level, but enjoyed none of it. I was too damned bamboozled by over an hour of nonsense beforehand.

The performances are fine. Cruise is the last remaining true action star, putting himself through a gruelling regimen to ensure he performs his own stunts. This shows on the screen and is very much appreciated and commendable. Simon Pegg returns as Benji to provide the comic relief. Ving Rhames’ Luther has a brief appearance which is bitter-sweet and lovable. Henry Czerny and Rolf Saxon are delightful additions – the only call-backs to the first film which don’t irritate, and actually elevate the film.

Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning is fine. It is serviceable. It delivers the heart-stopping thrills. It has timely theme: of what true humanity and human relationship is in a world dominated by AI, technology, simulated reality, and simulated interaction. This is all good. Unfortunately, all these positives are packaged in such a self-aggrandising and cack-handed manner as to be rendered inert. For a film whose story serves as an (admittedly histrionic) warning about the dangers of AI, it plays out as if designed by chatbot.

The Mission Impossible films have always been a vehicle for Tom Cruise. This has been their greatest strength – he is the last true movie star after all, and we may never see such a charismatic and powerful screen idol again. This has also been their greatest weakness. What a shame this only became apparent in the (potential) final outing.

2 stars.

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Article

Culture

Economics

Ethics

1 May 2025

6 min read

The rights and wrongs of making money with meme coins

When does investing become speculating, or even addictive gambling?

Laurence Fletcher

Laurence Fletcher is a journalist at the Financial Times.

A montage shows Trump with a raised fist against other images of him and the phrase 'fight fight fight'.

$Trump coin marketing image.

gettrumpmemes.com,

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs may have driven sharp swings in global financial markets, but his actions in markets a few months earlier were in some ways even more peculiar.

On the Friday before his inauguration as the 47th US President in January, the Republican surprised many with the launch of the $TRUMP memecoin, described by its website as “the only official Trump meme”. The cryptocurrency token, in which Trump’s family business owned a stake, initially soared in value to more than $14bn over that following weekend.

Then, on the Sunday, Trump’s wife Melania launched her own memecoin, $MELANIA, which reached a value of $8.5bn. Even the pastor who spoke at the president’s inauguration subsequently launched his own memecoin.

For those wondering what exactly a memecoin is, you are not alone. In short, they are a form of cryptocurrency - an asset class that itself has attracted plenty of questions about its substance and purpose - representing online viral moments. They have no fundamental value or business model and, according to the US securities regulator, “typically have limited or no use or functionality”.

Donald and Melania Trump’s coins subsequently plunged in price, but still have a value of around $2.5bn and $214mn respectively, according to website CoinMarketCap.

There are plenty of others in existence. PEPE, based on a comic frog, has a value of around $3.6bn; BONK, a cartoon dog, has a market cap of $1.5bn; and PNUT, a reference to a squirrel euthanised by authorities in New York and about which Trump was allegedly “fired up” (although doubt has since been cast on the president’s involvement in the matter), is still valued at around $174mn, despite having fallen sharply in price.

Dogecoin, seen as the world’s first memecoin and originally created as a joke, boasts a market value of around $25bn. (There are other memecoins which may not be suitable for these pages).

Some people’s willingness to buy an “asset” with no use or fundamental value may seem strange to more traditional investors. But it can be viewed as just one manifestation of the speculative investor behaviour evident since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and, indeed, at times throughout history.

The price of Bitcoin recently rose above $100,000, despite many investors still viewing it as having little or no value (in 2023 the UK’s Treasury select committee described cryptocurrencies as having “no intrinsic value, huge price volatility and no discernible social good”). In early 2021, shares in GameStop - a loss-making US video games retailer that some hedge funds were betting against - rocketed as much as 2,400 per cent, as retail investors piled in, many with the aim of inflicting pain on the hedge fund short sellers (in that respect at least, a highly successful strategy that became the subject of the film Dumb Money). The huge rise in AI and other tech stocks in recent years - until the recent tariff-driven volatility - has also been described as a bubble by some commentators.

Whether or not such episodes can be compared to infamous bouts of speculative mania in history depends on your point of view (and often can only be judged with the benefit of hindsight) - be it the 17th century Dutch tulip bulb mania, shares in the South Sea Company in the 18th century or the dotcom boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But it does give rise to the question of when investment should start to be described as speculation or even as gambling? And what are the rights and wrongs of any of those activities?

There can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources...

Gambling can be thought of as risking a stake on, for instance, the result of a game of chance or sport in the hope of a bigger payout. While often the result is purely down to chance, in some cases a strategy or an element of research (for instance of a horse or football team’s form) can be used. Investment, in contrast, tends to involve purported economic utility and assets believed to have some sort of underlying value, and holds the hope of future profit (although there are also plenty of bad investments or those that have gone to zero). While an investor must be prepared to lose their entire stake, in some cases such an event is relatively unlikely (for instance, if they buy a fund tracking the performance of a major stock exchange). Speculation is harder to define, but is generally seen as shorter term than investment, with more chance of a bigger gain or loss, and dependent on price fluctuations. Rightly or wrongly, the term has a more negative connotation than investment.

One writer who explored the ethics of these activities was Oswald von Nell-Breuning, a Jesuit theologian and economist who served as an adviser to the Pope and who was banned from publishing under the Nazis.

While he found that “one general definition cannot capture all the nuances” of speculation, he identified two different types of speculative activity - one that was purely trying to make a profit from financial market trading, and one based on trying to create a viable business. (See this article in the Catholic Social Science Review for a fuller explanation of Nell-Breuning’s views on speculation).

As the CSSR article shows, Nell-Breuning found that there can be positive effects from speculation - one might think of better liquidity and price discovery in a market, while, in commodity futures markets, speculators allow producers to hedge risk.

But he also argued that there can be negative effects, for instance if the actions of speculators force businesses in the real economy to change their plans or divert time and resources away from production.

And whereas gambling typically takes place within a circle of players who have chosen to take part, speculation, he wrote, can affect a greater portion of society - for instance, if it affects the price of shares or bonds they hold.

The Bible - on which Nell-Breuning’s faith and analysis was based - does not take a prescriptive approach to such activities. But it does provide some interesting guidance.

An entrepreneurial approach to business and investment is applauded, for instance when the writer of the book of Proverbs (traditionally believed to be King Solomon) praises the virtues of “an excellent wife”. These include investing in a field and using her earnings from business to plant a vineyard, and feeding her family from her gains.

Jesus tells a story of a master who, before going on a journey, gives his property to his servants, each according to their ability. To one he gives five “talents” (a large unit of money), to a second two and to a third servant he gives one.

The first servant trades with his talents and makes five more talents - a 100 per cent profit - and is applauded by the master on his return. The second servant also trades and similarly makes two more talents and is again applauded.

But the third servant, being afraid and believing the master to be “a hard man”, hides the money in a hole in the ground. He is condemned as “wicked and slothful”, and told that he should at least have put the money in the bank.

While Jesus’s story may primarily be about how we view God’s nature, how we use our God-given abilities and whether or not we can take risks in faith for Him, it is also hard not to see investment and indeed wise speculation as being virtuous activities here. Putting the money into a bank account is, in this story anyway, more of a fallback option.

But the Bible also warns us against putting money above all else in our lives. The love of money is, famously, a root of all sorts of evil, while we are also told to be content with what we have, and that “wealth gained hastily will dwindle”.

Nell-Breuning similarly warns that a “get-rich-quick” mindset, when this is placed above all else, can be harmful, and advises caution in situations where the lure of big profits can lead the speculator into market manipulation or fraud.

After all, both gambling and crypto trading have the potential to become dangerous and damaging addictions needing treatment.

Ultimately, Nell-Breuning struggled to come to a simple conclusion on the question of whether speculation, in and of itself, is morally wrong. It is, he wrote, a judgment call for those involved.

When making such decisions ourselves, his - and the Bible’s - warnings may be worth bearing in mind.