{"id":133229,"date":"2025-05-26T12:26:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-26T12:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/133229\/"},"modified":"2025-05-26T12:26:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-26T12:26:08","slug":"mission-impossible-villains-ranked-den-of-geek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/133229\/","title":{"rendered":"Mission: Impossible Villains Ranked | Den of Geek"},"content":{"rendered":"

6. Kurt Hendricks (Mission: Impossible \u2013 Ghost Protocol)<\/p>\n

Kurt Hendricks, aka Cobalt, is so much better in conception than in execution. Played by Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist, Hendricks is exactly the type of antagonist who should challenge Ethan Hunt. A true believer in a nihilistic ideology, Hendricks wants to spark a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. That extremist belief gives the IMF no choice but to engage in the sort of over-the-top action that makes the franchise so special.<\/p>\n

The threat posed by Hendricks might send Ethan scaling the Birge Kalifa, but as a person, he\u2019s a nothing onscreen. Nyqvist knows how to play menace, as demonstrated in his many genre roles in his native Sweden, or in American movies like John Wick<\/a>, but he has nothing to do here but glower. Worse, he\u2019s overshadowed by his minion Sabine (L\u00e9a Seydoux), whose personal connection to Hunt\u2019s colleague Jane Carter (Paula Patton) gives her an edge that Hendricks never achieves.<\/p>\n

5. Gabriel (Mission: Impossible \u2014 Dead Reckoning and The Final Reckoning)<\/p>\n

The main antagonist of Dead Reckoning<\/a> and The Final Reckoning, the agent known only as Gabriel (Esai Morales) is set up as Ethan Hunt\u2019s greatest foil. Not only does he apparently have espionage skills even greater than those of our hero, but he was directly responsible for Ethan joining IMF. We learn that Gabriel killed Ethan\u2019s girlfriend Marie and framed him for the murder, which put him on the IMF\u2019s radar. Worse still, Gabriel resurfaces as an acolyte of the all-powerful AI known as the Entity, giving him a driving ethos to match Ethan\u2019s desire to save everyone.<\/p>\n

On paper there\u2019s nothing wrong with this characterization. In practice it stinks. Dead Reckoning and especially The Final Reckoning suffer from a self-mythologizing that keeps dragging the movie back into the past instead of charging forward, and Gabriel embodies that backwards impulse. Gabriel is given some big moments of evil, directly killing fan favorites Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames), and Morales has fun playing up the villain role, but Gabriel\u2019s worst sin is boring the audience.<\/p>\n

4. Jim Phelps (Mission: Impossible)<\/p>\n

Before we get further, we must be clear: Jim Phelps is a good villain. The fact that he ranks so low here is a testament to the strength of the other baddies, not a knock against Jim. One of the main protagonists of the original 1960s television series (albeit portrayed by Peter Graves instead of Jon Voight<\/a>), Jim Phelps makes Mission: Impossible into a legacy sequel, connecting the classic series to a new set of heroes.<\/p>\n

However, Mission: Impossible has a bravery that most legacy sequels lack, turning the former hero into the new villain. Phelps initially seems to die in the attack that takes out most of Hunt\u2019s team at the start of the movie, during a mission that IMF boss Kitteridge later reveals to be a \u201cmole hunt.\u201d However, Phelps returns late in the film as first Ethan\u2019s ally and then his enemy, the true traitor that Kitteridge seeks. Voight brings plenty of gravitas to the role, but he struggles a bit with the stunts at the end\u2014despite the fact that he was 57 when the movie was shot, a year younger than Cruise was when filming on Dead Reckoning began.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"6. Kurt Hendricks (Mission: Impossible \u2013 Ghost Protocol) Kurt Hendricks, aka Cobalt, is so much better in conception…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-133229","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114574130225426559","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}