An action movie hero is only as memorable as his villain, which has been endlessly proven by the antagonists of the greatest action movies ever. Without a vile threat to drive the action, it’s easy for a given film in the genre to get stale, becoming a simple series of explosions and gunfights with no connective tissue keeping the audience engaged. While it’s great to watch Keanu Reeves tear through hordes of nameless mobsters in the John Wick franchise, it’s far more interesting to see capable action movie protagonists meet their match with devious villain performances.
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The best action movie villains thrive in absurdity, rising to the occasion of their roles in decidedly over-the-top films. Some might be comedic, with an almost lovable sense of humor that often makes them hard to root against. Others are more classically evil, getting across a stern sense of malice that leaves no room for funny business to dilute their plans. Whatever the case, many of the best cinematic villains come from action movies, with talented actors often being able to let loose as more dangerous or volatile characters.
10 The T-1000
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
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One of the best action movies of all time, it should be no surprise that Terminator 2: Judgment Day features one of the most compelling villainous performances around. Taking place a few years after the first Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day picks up with an institutionalized Sarah Connor re-uniting with her son when yet another murderous android is sent back in time to kill them both. Robert Patrick stars as the T-1000, a cutting-edge new robot constructed of liquid metal that’s able to effortlessly blend in and kill its targets via an amorphous body.
Patrick is breathtaking as the cool, dangerous T-1000. Being a robot, the performance is largely emotionless, with a deadly efficiency behind Patrick’s eyes coloring everything he does. That being said, the machine is eerily good at impersonating people when it needs to be, and even develops personality of its own when it coldly wags its finger at Sarah Connor’s futile attempts to fight it. Fueled by pure dedication to the character, Robert Patrick was even able to actually sprint fast enough to keep up with a moving car without panting, a chilling glare on his sharp face all the while.
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9 Hans Gruber
Die Hard
It’s safe to say that Die Hard wouldn’t be the testament of pop culture that it is if it weren’t for the efforts of Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber. Though the British actor might have been better known as the serpent-tongued teacher Professor Snape in the Harry Potter series, he truly shines in Die Hard, a classic action movies starring Bruce Willis as a normal beat cop who gets called upon to rescue his wife’s workplace from the clutches of a vicious band of terrorists. Hans Gruber is their leader, a shrewd negotiator and brilliant tactician.
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What makes Rickman so fun as a villain is Gruber’s powerfully higher-than-thou sense of self-righteousness, which comes oozing out of every nasally line he utters. The fact that Gruber would’ve never expected an everyman as crass or unsophisticated as Bruce Willis’ John McClane to beat him makes it all the more satisfying when it does. His look of surprise when he finally falls from the top of Nakatomi Plaza is as delicious of a fate for a sneering villain as could ever be asked for.
8 Agent Smith
The Matrix
Quite possibly the role Hugo Weaving was born to play, Agent Smith is one of the most recognizable villains in movie history for good reason. Agent Smith first appears in The Matrix, the Wachowski sisters’ famous sci-fi epic that takes place in a dystopian future in which machines have taken over, and humanity’s minds have been trapped within a computerized re-creation of the real world. Agent Smith is one of the many sentient programs sent to maintain the status quo of this prison, ensuring that humanity isn’t able to escape.
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The pure malice Hugo Weaving carries in his voice as Agent Smith is a wonderful soundtrack to the Matrix movies as he chases Neo throughout the series. Despite being an artificial intelligence, Smith is far from emotionless, going to great lengths to describe his bitter hatred for the illogical humans and lamenting his role in the process of keeping them alive at all. From behind a fashionable pair of shades, Hugo Weaving has forever immortalized himself as one of the greatest action movie antagonists of all time.
7 Jack Horner
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
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At first glance, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish may not seem to qualify as an action movie at all, being a spin-off of a family animation franchise with a bigger focus on comedy and pop culture references than anything else. But those in the know will recognize the film to have one of the greatest, most dense collections of action scenes this side of the 2000s. While the film manages to juggle three fantastic villains, all of which being great performances in their own right, John Mulaney’s Big Jack Horner stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Chasing Puss in Boots and company to the location of a magical wish, Jack Horner hilariously demonstrates his utter void of empathy time and time again, confounding the efforts of the classic storybook conscience Jiminy Cricket. The gleeful glint in Jack’s eye as he torches enchanted forests and flings his loyal minions into mortal danger is hard to resist, an animated villain with refreshingly little nuance. His monologue about his idyllic childhood not being enough for his magic-obsessed mania is one of the funniest jokes in the series.
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6 Zorg
The Fifth Element
Gary Oldman is quite a well-versed actor when it comes to villainous performances. From the scarred gangster Drexl Spivey in True Romance to Dracula himself in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oldman is a recipe for instant success in evil roles. As far as action movies go, none of his performances steals the show quite like the character of Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg in The Fifth Element, another action movie starring Bruce Willis.
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Zorg is the perfect archetypal campy villain, the wealthy leader of Zorg Industries who weaponizes his affluence to an absurd degree. Chewing on scenery with a delightful southern drawl, Oldman somehow manages to make Zorg’s bizarre hairpiece work as he monologues about the mindset of a true killer, haphazardly wielding his iconic action movie gun, the ZF-1. Only Gary Oldman would be talented enough to make a character as strange and quirky as Zorg work as a genuinely threatening villain.
5 Clarence Boddicker
Robocop
Another film in the conversation for the greatest sci-fi action movie of all time, Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop has a villain or two who set it ahead of the pack. The movie supposes that an idealistic family man cop in a dystopian, cyberpunk Detroit is killed horrifically by a roving gang of bandits, only to be revived by a megacorporation as an android crime fighter. The gang’s leader is Clarence Boddicker, played by Kurtwood Smith, whose unassuming name and appearance betray his commitment to vile acts of crime in the name of gaining more and more power.
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In truth, Clarence isn’t the major overarching villain of Robocop, being more of a lieutenant to the real lead evildoer, OCP senior president Dick Jones. However, Boddicker is by far the more memorable of the two, always with a smarmy grin while committing his horrendous crimes. From the way he effortlessly delivers Boddicker’s shockingly colorful lines to the sniveling cowardice he displays when his life is on the line, Kurtwood Smith puts on a character who is astonishingly fun to hate.
4 The Joker
The Dark Knight
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Needing little introduction, Heath Ledger’s Joker is not only the best cinematic version of the Joker, but one of the greatest movie villains of all time. Following up on the joker card tease at the end of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight opens with the Joker perfectly-executing what ends up being a one-man heist against a mob-owned bank, striking at Gotham’s criminal corruption. Soon becoming fascinated with the Batman, The Joker goes on to do whatever he can to get Gotham and its hero to abandon whatever pretenses of morality they have.
It’s easy to see why Ledger’s performance has quickly become so legendary. From his genuinely funny delivery of dark humor to his terrifying presence, enough to make Michael Caine forget his lines upon seeing him in character for the first time, Ledger truly summoned every ounce of his acting talent to channel the Clown Prince of Crime. Only a performance as generationally impactful as Ledger’s Joker could summon so much fear by simply licking his lips.
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3 Hans Landa
Inglorious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s World War II period piece is full of obscene action beats and absurdist humor, but nothing stands out quite like Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa. An Austrian SS officer in Nazi Germany, Landa is one of the most despicable characters ever put to film, hunting down Jewish refugees with ruthless efficiency and a strange sense of politeness. This only makes it all the more satisfying when he does get his comeuppance, despite being confident that he can switch sides at the last minute to avoid capital punishment.
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Interestingly enough, Tarantino was actually hesitant to cast Waltz as the film’s memorable antagonist, worried that his friendly persona would bleed through too much into the villainy. Upon watching the fake smiles Landa flashes at his enemies, it’s easy to see how he could come to this conclusion, but Waltz’s likability only makes Landa all the more terrifying as a villain. Undeniably charming yet undeniably evil, Hans Landa represents a sort of capricious opportunism that’s all too common in the real world.
2 Castor Troy
Face/Off
As a performer, Nicolas Cage isn’t exactly known for his subtlety, harnessing a powerful potential for neurotic characters as best shown off in Face/Off. Indeed, the film begins with one of Cage’s best performances yet, leveraging the full use of his hysterical talents to portray a senseless crime villain. However, when the baton passes to John Travolta, Castor Troy’s character somehow becomes even more entertaining.
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The perplexing dual performances of Face/Off lend themselves to a brilliant villain, with John Travolta having to match Nicolas Cage’s overacting with some crazed shouting of his own. But Castor Tory’s best moments with Travolta’s face are when he’s infiltrating Sean Archer’s life, promising his family that “There’s gonna be some changes around here” with an uncharacteristic glint in his eye. Face/Off is a phenomenal action film carried by its antagonist, whether he’s being played by Nicolas Cage or John Travolta.
1 Davy Jones
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
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Putting a tentacled face behind the classic sailor’s verbiage of “Davy Jones’ locker” was one of the most clever choices of Gore Verbinski’s Pirattes of the Caribbean trilogy, one that wouldn’t have worked without Bill Nighy. A cursed immortal sailor, Davy Jones is the fishy enemy of William Turner and Jack Sparrow, doomed to sail The Flying Dutchman as a retriever of lost souls. His incredibly lovingly-rendered appearance won the SFX team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean series a well-earned Academy Award.
As great as Davy Jones looks, it’s hard not to feel like the motion-captured expressions of Bill Nighy were instrumental in crafting his quirky mannerisms, from raising his eyebrow to puttering with his slimy cephalopod mouth. Nighy’s voice is a booming canon of fear in both films, living up to the legend of the sea’s most feared captain. Nighy also played a computer generated villain in another Verbinski film, as Rattlesnake Jake in Rango, another contender for a great villainous performance in an action movie.
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