10 Movie Villains That Upstaged Other Villains

Plenty of bad guys will employ underlings to do their bidding for them throughout their movie, allowing for some big fight scenes without having to jump the shark, saving the big clash between the main protagonist and antagonist for the very end.

But what happens when the henchman is more compelling than their boss, as is the case in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy? The chief antagonist of the story was Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden), but his right-hand man, Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran), was a stronger villain in just about every way.

Rasputin himself was, for lack of a better word, boring; a forgettable big bad with a generic motivation. Kroenen, however, became instantly memorable just based on his appearance alone, with the metal mask, the blades that so effortlessly extended from his arms, and his skill in wielding them.

Originally Adolf Hitler's greatest assassin, Kroenen's backstory only made for a more interesting character. His surgical addiction saw him remove his own eyelids and lips, among other things, and even with the retrospectively dodgy CGI of 2004, he was difficult to look at without the mask and armour. Though he was only the puppet to Rasputin's puppeteer, he still managed to steal every single scene from his boss.