With Daniel Craig’s third Bond film, Skyfall, being released later this month, I decided to list my Top-10 favourite Bond villains. I decided to do this list, since I already made a list of my favourite Bond films last year. These are the villains from Bond films that really stand out for me.
I will also be listing my Top-10 James Bond henchmen, so look forward to that.
And finally, this list contains spoilers!!
10. Elektra King
Okay, so The World is Not Enough wasn’t my favourite Bond movie, but at least it tried to be decently surprising in various aspects. One of these was the sudden plot-twist which revealed that one of the Bond girls was actually the mastermind of the film’s plot all along. Elektra King turned when she was kidnapped by Renard (the man with a bullet in his brain) and due to a nice healthy dose of Stockholm syndrome, decided to ruin her father’s oil empire.
Elektra King made the list purely for pulling one of the biggest character switches in Bond history: going from being Bond’s lover to kidnapping his boss and turning against him. Without this switch The World is Not Enough would be a lot more generic and uninteresting as a Bond film.
Also, I felt the list really needed one female entry, so King fit the bill the best.
9. Dr. Julius No
The villain of the very first Bond film was certainly interesting enough to warrant a place on the list. Dr. No is one of the many head operatives of SPECTRE, whom Bond encounters in the Caribbean while trying to investigate an assassination. No’s plan is to sabotage American rocket tests to prevent them from winning the space race (this was the 1960s after all) and runs his own atomic powered base on an island where a dragon-like tank keeps locals away.
No’s most notable trait are his bionic hands which have enough power to crush one’s bones, but which prove ineffective to saving No when he personally battles Bond near his nuclear reactor. Dr. No is just hella cool for not being afraid to go head-to-head with Bond. Sadly, No appears mostly at the end of his eponymous film so we really don’t get to spend much time with him.
Still, you gotta give the man a hand. *rim-shot*
8. Gustav Graves (a.k.a. Colonel Moon)
Pierce Brosnan’s final Bond flick, Die Another Day, was certainly a valiant effort to try do something new and different with the franchise, as well as featuring the most outrageously ridiculous stunts ever seen in the franchise and by also being an anniversary flick with a number of well-hidden references to Bond’s past. Also, I have to admit the villain of the film was rather surprising.
Gustav Graves is a diamond millionaire known for doing crazy publicity stunts (just because) and for challenging people into crazy sword fights at Madonna’s little gentleman club (at the risk of getting heckled, probably her only decent film role). In a shocking twist though, it’s revealed that Graves is actually the North Korean Colonel Moon, son of General Moon (not sure if those are their ranks or their first names) who was thought to have died in the film’s epic 15 minute pre-credit sequence but who actually just went into hiding and had some major plastic surgery done.
Graves is just a lunatic who wants to blow up South Korea, but his incredibly twisted back-story made me really like him. Of course, creative plastic surgery isn’t exactly unique amongst Bond villains, as we will see later in the list, but Graves at least deserves to be on the list for his sheer effort.
7. Hugo Drax
For all its silly laser-blasting fun, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Roger Moore space-age fun-fest, Moonraker. Hugo Drax is the builder of space-ships who fakes the hijacking of one of his shuttles to throw off the MI6. In actuality he plans to have all of humanity wiped out and start his own ideal race of genetically superior men from the safety of an orbiting space-station.
Now in truth, Drax’s plot is very similar to that of Karl Stromberg from The Spy Who Loved Me, with the exception that Stromberg wanted to build his perfect society underwater, which I think instantly makes Stromberg’s plan more lame. I loved Lonsdale’s performance as Drax in addition to which his spaceship-building made sure that Moonraker got to pay homage to a number of well-known sci-fi films of the day.
Drax deserves credit for ambition as well that his plan so very nearly succeeded. And sure, he died flying out of an air-lock like a bitch – that’s just the way the world turns…
6. Franz Sanchez
Bond has gone up against all manner of villains from secret terrorist organisations to megalomaniacs looking to see the world burn. But sometimes, it’s nice to see Bond going up against a villain who is undoubtedly powerful and dangerous, but who doesn’t have a private army at his command. In Licence to Kill, Bond’s nemesis was a drug dealer.
Franz Sanchez got on Bond’s bad side when he tried to feed his best friend, Felix Leiter, to a shark. After that, it was payback time with Bond infiltrating Sanchez’s organisation and even deserting the MI6 in order to get his revenge. Sanchez was played by the suave, slick and lovably hateable Robert Davi. Sanchez just comes off as a cocky and confident son of a bitch, who believes that as long as he has the drug money to pay people off, he can’t be touched.
What makes Sanchez so great is that he’s the most realistic Bond villain that had ever been depicted up till then. However, Sanchez didn’t perhaps quite have enough personality to make it into the top-5, but he’s certainly earned his spot on this list.
5. Auric Goldfinger
As mentioned in my Top-10 Bond films list, one of the reasons I loved Connery’s third Bond movie was due to its ambitious and gold-loving villain, Auric Goldfinger. Goldfinger’s obsession with gold is so absolute that he even uses it to kill people. On top of which, he owns perhaps one of the most iconic Bond villain lines in history: “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”
Goldfinger’s plan was no more and no less than striking the national mint of Fort Knox with the help of Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus. That is a plan you can’t help but to appreciate, especially given that Goldfinger was actually succesful (or so he thought).
Auric Goldfinger was also the first non-SPECTRE villain depicted in the Bond films, so he deserves extra credit for being so memorable despite being a one-of character.
4. Francisco Scaramanga
How could I not include The Man with the Golden Gun? It’s Christopher Lee for crying out loud. Well, Monsieur Scaramanga deserves to be on the list for a number of reasons. 1.) Kickass island hide-away, 2.) He needs only one bullet to kill his victims, 3.) His bitching assembled gun, 4.) His kickass midget henchman Nick-Nack.
I could go on and on, but the bottom-line with Scaramanga is that he’s just one cool motherfucker. He wants to fight it out with Bond, mano-e-mano, and he’s willing to give Bond every chance of beating him. Scaramanga was really Bond’s ultimate nemesis until GoldenEye as far as I’m concerned.
The only reason Scaramanga isn’t higher is that I always found his third nipple to be a little distracting, even though I turned it into an effective comedic gimmick at one point.
3. Alec Trevelyan (a.k.a. Janus a.k.a 006)
GoldenEye is one of my all-time favourite movies for all the things that it got right as a Bond movie. I’d always been curious about the other agents in MI6 and sort of disappointed that Bond was the only one that was ever shown. GoldenEye fixed that by not just showing another MI6 agent in action but also making him the villain of the movie.
Alec Trevelyan was born to Cossack parents who were sent back to Soviet Russia when Alec was just a boy. He finds work in MI6 and later fakes his own death in an operation and becomes a Russian criminal boss known as Janus. His goal is to gain control of the Russian GoldenEye satellite which shoots Electro-Magnetic Pulses (EMP) that destroy anything running on electricity.
Alec was just cool, because not only was he formidably ambitious Bond villain, being an MI6 agent, I felt he was also a match for Bond in one-on-one combat, which is proved to be true during James and Alec’s fight atop the satellite dish at the film’s end.
2. Le Chiffre
One of the things that made Daniel Craig’s debut as Bond, Casino Royale, so excellent was definitely the villain. Le Chiffre, played by the excellent Mads Mikkelsen, is both a cool, a pathetic, a dangerous, a wimpy, a slimy and a seriously creepy villain. It might be a bit puzzling how someone could be all those things effectively and a big part of it is Mikkelsen being just a damn good actor.
Le Chiffre is perhaps one of the least empowered Bond villains. He gambles away money that isn’t his due to his sheer cockiness and belief that he can never lose at anything. The Craig version of Casino Royale did an excellent job of fleshing out his character motives well before the main attraction (because at its core, the original Casino Royale is actually about a card game more than anything else).
Never the less, I’m sure every man in the audience felt a twinge of sympathy pain in their nut-sack when Le Chiffre finally gets down and dirty and begins torturing Bond with a length of rope and a bottomless chair.
1. Ernst Stavro Blofeld
I don’t think there is a Bond villain to date that can honestly match the reputation, image and effectiveness of Blofeld. Head of SPECTRE, Blofeld was initially Bond’s faceless arch-nemesis – who tried his best to get rid of Bond and show off MI6. Blofeld has appeared more consistently than any Bond villain (mostly since Bond villains tend to die at the end of the film) but his iconic presence is always welcome.
He first appeared with his face obscured in From Russia with Love, hatching a scheme to kill Sean Connery. Blofeld didn’t stop being relevant even after his face was finally revealed in You Only Live Twice. Blofeld continued to hide his identity with plastic surgery and continued to appear in different disguises. He finally meets his end in the pre-credit sequence of For Your Eyes Only, where he met his end at the hands of Roger Moore. He has therefore had the longest run of any Bond villain (six films in all).
Blofeld’s tenacity is remarkable and he is unquestionably the most iconic Bond villain and, in my view, more than deserving of the number-1 spot on this list.
