Kevin Bacon’s Villain Roles, Ranked (Including The Toxic Avenger)

It was really looking like the remake of The Toxic Avenger was never going to make it to audiences. But not only is it here, but it’s a wide theatrical release. This also means we now have another movie where Hollywood legend Kevin Bacon is playing a villain. Kevin Bacon can do it all, but as great as he is as Ren McCormack in Footloose, he’s an actor who excels playing antagonists. What we’re doing here is ranking every antagonist he has ever played on the big screen across all of his movies and all of his decades in the business. It’s not a ranking of the quality of the movies housing the performances, but the quality of the movies does often have a way of factoring in.

The catch is that they actually have to be a villain of the piece as opposed to a character, even an unsavory character, who is in the way of the protagonists. That means no Willie O’Keefe from JFK, John Labat from MaXXXine, David Lindhagen from Crazy, Stupid, Love., Chip Diller from National Lampoon’s Animal House (not to mention, in hindsight, Chip Diller doesn’t seem like he’s as bad a guy as the film’s protagonists), or Capt. Jack Ross in A Few Good Men.

15) Hayes in R.I.P.D.

Forget X-Men Origins: Wolverine or Green Lantern, R.I.P.D. is the worst comic book movie Ryan Reynolds has ever starred in. It’s Men in Black if Men in Black had a bunch of fart jokes, awful special effects, and two leads with no chemistry. It also has Jeff Bridges playing the exact character he played in True Grit, which actually makes his Oscar nominated work as Rooster Cogburn look (slightly) less impressive in hindsight.

Bacon survives the film the best, but his Bobby Hayes is still pretty unremarkable. He’s the partner of Reynolds’ Nick Walker who orchestrates Walker’s demise so he can get some gold that allows him to build a staff so he and his fellow Deados can have eternal life on Earth. It’s all very ridiculous, and worse yet it’s obvious Bacon is playing the surprise villain as soon as he’s introduced.

14) Captain Cade Grant in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F

Netflix’s Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is better than Beverly Hills Cop III and an overall fine return to form. But that’s really the extent of the compliment it deserves.

And, like R.I.P.D., it also has a surprise villain whose reveal as a villain is far from a surprise. That would be Bacon’s Captain Cade Grant, the head of the Beverly Hills Police Department who is also a drug lord. The movie doesn’t give Bacon much to do besides be vaguely threating to Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley until the point he’s outright threating.

Stream Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F on Netflix.

13) Jorge in Beauty Shop

Beauty Shop, a spin-off of the Barbershop franchise wasn’t the typical Kevin Bacon project, but that’s what makes him the actor he is. He can do anything, acclimate to even the goofiest of tones.

Here, he plays Jorge, the Austrian long blonde haired former boss of Queen Latifah’s Gina Norris. It’s not the meatiest part in the world, but Bacon seems to be having fun.

Stream Beauty Shop with an MGM+ Prime Video channel subscription.

12) Theo Conroy in You Should Have Left

You Should Have Left is not one of Blumhouse’s stronger efforts, and there’s not really much Bacon could have done to save it. It’s also every bit as predictable as Hide and Seek, starring Robert De Niro or Dream House, starring Daniel Craig.

As could be gathered by those two examples, the whole time we think Bacon’s Theo Conroy is the protagonist but really he’s the antagonist. He didn’t save his first wife when she was drowning and while he and his new wife have been in this house, seeing a mysterious figure, it turns out they’ve just been seeing Theo’s past self. Points to this villain for actually seeing the error of his ways and trapping himself in the spooky house, though.

Stream You Should Have Left on Peacock.

11) Joe Hickey in Trapped

Joe Hickey is the husband of Cheryl (Courtney Love). Their daughter, Katie, died because of Dr. Will Jennings’ negligence. Now, Cheryl is holding Dr. Jennings at gunpoint while Joe is doing the same at his home with his wife (Charlize Theron), Karen.

They also demand ransom money from Dr. Jennings if he ever wants to see his daughter, Abby (Dakota Fanning), again. It’s pretty standard thriller movie stuff and Trapped never manages to really stand out in spite of solid work from Bacon and Theron. Much to Bacon’s credit, he makes Joe a more complicated individual than he would have been in the hands of a lesser actor.

10) Ray Duquette in Wild Things

Of all the twist villains on this list, Wild Things‘ Ray Duquette is the best. This is a movie with no clear protagonist. Everyone we follow seems to have their hands dirty in something, be it sex, theft, or deception. As well they should, because that’s exactly the case, including Bacon’s detective, who for 80% of the movie seems like the most straightforward and clean-handed of the four main characters.

Duquette is actually the one who sets the events of the film in motion. Specifically, he murdered the friend of Neve Campbell’s Suzie Toller, which is what puts the goal of revenge in her mind. He also murders Denise Richards’ Kelly Van Ryan. Though he bites the dust at the hands of Matt Dillon’s Sam Lombardo, who is then killed moments later by Toller, who sails off into the sunset with the cash.

Stream Wild Things with a Starz Apple TV Channel subscription.

9) Martin Thiel in Criminal Law

After protagonist roles in Footloose, Quicksilver, and She’s Having a Baby, Bacon dipped his toes in fully villainous territory with Criminal Law. He plays the white collar 20-something Martin Thiel IV, a serial killer who targets women who have had abortions. Specifically, abortions performed by his gynecologist mother.

His mother has always been dismissive of him, and when his father told him (at the age of 14) that his mom in fact wanted him aborted, something within Martin snapped. Criminal Law is Primal Fear if that film needed a few rewrites, but Bacon plays Thiel with the required amount of cold-heartedness and entitlement. He does his best with the melodramatic material.

Stream Criminal Law on MGM+.

8) Jacques in Super

Before he was co-heading the DCU, even before he was helming the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, James Gunn was directing a much smaller superhero movie with Super. And, in that, he worked with The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special‘s Kevin Bacon for the first time.

But Jacques in Super couldn’t be any more different than the well, Kevin Bacon, of the Holiday Special. Jacques is true scum, a man who plies his girlfriend with drugs all the while laughing at the sad man he took her from. Not a great guy.

Stream Super with an AMC+ Prime Video channel subscription.

7) Bob Garbinger in The Toxic Avenger

The excellent new take on Troma’s The Toxic Avenger (which is far more accessible than the original films, in spite of its Terrifier 3-like unrated release) is well-cast across the board. And, while Elijah Wood steals the spotlight in the villain department with his Fritz Garbinger, Bacon has plenty of fun as well as his older brother, Bob.

Bob is the CEO of a massive company in league with the mob. He can’t pay the mob back, so he knows his time is up. He gets a chance to play a real wild card when he learns a janitor of his company has been turned into Toxie. Garbinger is a fun role for Bacon. He gets to yell, he gets to put on a smile in commercials aimed at fooling the public, and he gets to turn into a monster. Of the actor’s three B-level comics/superhero movie villain roles, this one is the best. For one, it gives him the most to work with and, two, he’s clearly having fun.

6) Sheriff Kretzer in Cop Car

Few things are as frightening as a grown man chasing after children, and that’s exactly what Cop Car‘s Sheriff Kretzer is up to. In this film, from future MCU Spider-Man trilogy director Jon Watts, we follow two ten-year-old boys who accidentally discover an abandoned police car.

That police car belongs to Sheriff Kretzer, and his interest isn’t so much in the return of the car as it is who is stashed in the trunk. Sheriff Kretzer is a murderer, and he’d prefer to get away with it.

5) Wade in The River Wild

While The River Wild isn’t quite as good as its cast, it’s still an excellent little ’90s thriller. And again…that cast.

It says a lot about Bacon’s work here was bank robber Wade that he manages to give Meryl Streep a serious run for her acting quality money. Streep is a force of nature in this and anything else, and when she shares the screen with Bacon we believe the danger oozing from his character (who has no problem making friends with a kid to essentially hold the child’s parents over a barrel) as much as we believe the capability of Streep’s Gail Hartman to one-up him.

4) Sebastian Shaw in X-Men: First Class

There’s a strong argument that X-Men: First Class is the best X-Men film to date. A big part of its success is the A-plus casting, including Bacon as former Nazi doctor (and secret mutant) Sebastian Shaw.

Shaw’s goal is to start a nuclear war, all for the sake of strengthening mutantkind and perhaps fully eliminating humankind. If he has to go through a few mutants standing in his way of that goal, so be it.

Stream X-Men: First Class on Disney+.

3) Owen Whistler in They/Them

They/Them‘s Owen Whistler is the head of The Whistler Gay Conversion Camp. He makes himself come across as a gentle soul who wants what’s best for the kids, but in all actuality he’s a psychopath. Even if he wasn’t, he runs a conversion camp, so his definition of what’s best for the kids wouldn’t be what’s best for the kids, it would just be trying to make the kids more like what he would consider normal.

As a whole, They/Them isn’t a fantastic movie, but Owen is a great villain. Like the number one entry on this list, he seems to get true pleasure out of tormenting young people and forcing them to do things that will scar them forever.

Stream They/Them on Peacock.

2) Sebastian Caine in Hollow Man

Hollow Man is a very solid slasher movie that has been mostly forgotten, but it works better prior to its switch over to that subgenre. When we first meet Bacon’s Dr. Sebastian Caine he’s egotistical but overall just comes across as career-driven, even if that comes at the expense of ethics.

Once he becomes invisible, however, we see who Dr. Caine really is, especially when he goes to his beautiful neighbor’s house and assaults her. Hollow Man has Dr. Caine go progressively more insane due to his forced isolation, but we also get the sense that his insanity isn’t much of a leap for him. The assault and the subsequent murders he commits while invisible were things that he had definitely thought of doing before. Maybe not actively, but somewhere within him, invisible or not, there was that capability.

1) Nokes in Sleepers

Sleepers is not the easiest movie to watch. It follows a group of young friends from Hell’s Kitchen who are sent to a reform school where they are tormented by the guards. This is especially true of the head guard, Sean Nokes.

Nokes beats them, he molests them, and he plays with their minds. He is the definition of evil, and Bacon plays him to contemptable perfection. Not once do we feel anything remotely resembling sympathy for this man, and he will always be the most morally bankrupt individual Bacon ever plays.

Tremors Movies, Ranked by Scariness