Review: Cruise goes 'Rogue' in new 'Mission'

Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation doubles as a two-hour celebrity episode of American Ninja Warrior for Tom Cruise.

Watch Tom use acrobatics and tight abs to escape capture! Watch Tom hold his breath for a long time underwater! Watch Tom hold on for dear life as he dangles outside a plane mid-takeoff!

Cruise’s superspy Ethan Hunt continues to hang with the Bonds, Bournes and Bauers of the world in the fifth Mission: Impossible movie (*** out of four; rated PG-13; opens Friday nationwide), written and directed by Edge of Tomorrow scribe Christopher McQuarrie. The action bonanza gets a little lost in its own spycraft, but offers scenes both fast and furious and a fabulous couple of additions to the world of the IMF (short for Impossible Mission Force, obviously).

The Rogue Nation part of the title refers to a nefarious new secret organization called the Syndicate, which utilizes presumed-dead operatives from around the world to carry out terrorist acts and tear down the global system that spawned them. Well, Ethan will have none of that as America’s top secret agent, though he’s a fugitive from the government itself after one too many rogue missions.

From Belarusian airspace to the Vienna Opera to the streets of Morocco, the hero plays cat-and-mouse with a new villain on the scene — Solomon Lane, played with cold calm by Sean Harris — while making an ally in the mysterious Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a capable agent and lethal weapon herself who has been dealing with the devilish Lane.

With a number of movies under its belt, the M:I franchise finally has Avengered itself — previous cinematic shenanigans are referred to when CIA chief Alan Hunley (a delightfully smarmy Alec Baldwin) makes a power play to shut down the IMF crew once and for all. It’s like a greatest hits squad of supporting players surrounding Ethan, including by-the-book agent William Brandt (Jeremy Renner), hacker extraordinaire Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and tech guy Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), who finally gets thrown into some dangerous fieldwork.

Rogue Nation gets convoluted in its series of twists, though McQuarrie offers a surprising amount of welcome humor, sometimes with the gadgetry — watch Tom use a bass flute as a rifle! — and other times in the exhaustion that comes after one death-defying episode or another.

While not as top notch as the action scenes in the previous Impossible outing, Ghost Protocol, there’s some stellar stuff here, especially a speedy chase through Casablanca on motorcycles and in sports cars, with a soundtrack comprised solely of revving engines and Pegg’s panicky screams.

There’s not much character development involved with Ethan this time around, though you don’t need it as much with all the stunts Cruise is doing. (And at 53, dude’s still outstanding.) Yet his match is made in Ferguson’s enigmatic Ilsa, an attractive bone-breaker of a femme fatale who looks like she stepped right off the set of a 007 adventure.

Teaming her with Cruise again would be a mission impossible not to watch.