If you were a mega successful 53-year-old actor, you'd be forgiven if you decided to slow down a bit. But Tom cruise doesn't do slow. This is his fifth outing as no mission impossible agent Ethan Hunt, with a sixth instalment recently announced.

If that wasn't enough, he's also got a pipeline positively bulging with forthcoming projects, including sequels to both Top Gun and Jack Reacher. It's just as well then that his role here, which looks about as physically demanding as you can possibly get, could prove to be a good work out for what's yet to come.

The Impossible Mission Force (IMF) are used to tackling tricky jobs - hence the 'Impossible' in their name - but Nathan Hunt (Cruise) appears to have met his match following up on a lead in a record shop in London.

He escapes the evil clutch of his captor, thanks to the intervention of the versatile Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), and contacts IMF head honcho William Brant (Jeremy Renner). Brant has some bad news though; the CIA don't like the IMF's methods in general and Hunt in particular, so ask a Senate committee for the CIA to absorb the IMF so they have all the control. Not only that, but they want to bring Hunt back into the fold. Hunt, however, has other ideas.

With the help of his long term friend and colleague Benji (Simon Pegg), Hunt remains undercover so he can not only discover more about this dangerous threat known only as the Syndicate, but more importantly, how to bring it down.

Every franchise has its lulls, but whereas most have them towards the end of their shelf life, Mission: Impossible appears to have done it in reverse. 2011's Ghost Protocol - the fourth in the series - was quite possibly the most spectacular and entertaining to date. Thankfully Rogue Nation is in a similar vein.

In the earlier films, the plots seemed unnecessarily convoluted. Here, director Christopher McQuarrie has stripped the story right down, making it easy enough to understand right from the off. Essentially, there are some bad guys that Nathan Hunt has got to take down, which he does with a little help from his friends. Simple. Good vs evil with no added on complications.

This allows McQuarrie to focus on what the film does best, its action set pieces. Once again Cruise literally risks life and limb by insisting that he does the majority of his own stunts. To a certain extent, in doing so is his downfall; the idea is obviously that audiences can relate to his character more seeing him in the thick of the action. However, his showing off clearly reveals the truth, and that is that he is either part or fully machine, much like the Terminator, as it's the only explanation of how a man of his age can participate in such unbelievable stunts. Younger men struggle to get themselves out of a comfy chair, so how Cruise manages what he does beggars belief.

On the subject of the set pieces themselves, it's easy enough to become blasé about most, but these ones truly do stick out as being on the right side of awesome, with audiences running around afterwards in an attempt to pick their jaws up from the floor.

There is often an almost desert dryness to MI films, so it's good to see Pegg return to do his necessary comedy shtick. He's slightly more reserved than usual, but in doing do so, he allows Cruise the opportunity to have a bit of fun, which he doesn't normally show when playing Hunt.

A welcome new recruit to the team is Ferguson; She gives an impressive kick-ass performance, as if she's been doing these kind of roles all her life. It's certainly not something expected from someone probably best known for playing the reserved Elizabeth in 2013's TV drama The White Queen.

Rogue Nation is the second collaboration between McQuarrie and Cruise (he helmed Jack Reacher as well as wrote the Cruise flick Valkyrie) and it won't be their last. The director has already signed on to direct MI Six, and on the strength of this impressive effort, it already feels like another mission with the team that will be impossible to miss.