SPOILERS ABOUND FOR MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 1-6 (OBVIOUSLY)

Say what you want about this franchise, I certainly have over the last couple weeks on the show, but the Mission: Impossible films are not shy about dispatching their villains and heavies in (mostly) glorious fashion. Indeed, ever since Brian De Palma's 1996 espionage masterpiece dropped, the bad guys in these movies have been taken out in a variety of wild ways. Having re-watched the entire franchise (again) in anticipation of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1, I thought it might be fun to take a look back at the carnage to try and figure out which villain exit is my favorite.

#6 - Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott)

After trying (and failing) to sell the deadly Chimera virus to the highest bidder, while also coming up short on spreading the last dose of the stuff in downtown Sydney via walking biological weapon Nyah Hall (Thandiwe Newton), disgraced former IMF agent and casual post-sex bathrobe wearer, Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) is left with one last option: a fight to the death on the beach against Ethan Hunt.

The fight itself is pretty solid. Lots of good close-up, hand-to-hand fighting (with maybe one too many Ethan Hunt-delivered flying kicks), along with all the knife stuff, including Cruise attempting to re-enact the wooden spike bit from Zombi 2 . But when it comes time to say goodbye to Ambrose, he’s simply shot a couple times in the chest by Ethan after Luther notices our guy trying to jump back up for one last scare. For a movie that features tons of wild car explosions and one gnarly, if ridiculous, motorcycle joust, the curtain call for Sean Ambrose is kinda weak sauce.

#5 - Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist)

Brad Bird’s entry, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol really blew the doors off the franchise, taking the film series to yet another level of action spectacle. You’ll recall that this is the one where Ethan Hunt, needing to gain access to a hotel’s server room and then quickly race back to his suite, is required to scale the outside of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper.

When the Swedish-born, Russian nuclear analyst-turned-villian, Kurt Hendricks (a.k.a. Cobalt) has already launched a nuke off a submarine that’s headed straight for San Francisco, only Hunt can track him down and snag the control unit that will stop the rocket. Hunt eventually chases Hendricks to the greatest parking garage I’ve ever seen in my life, and the two begin the wildest game of keep-away ever filmed.

That all ends when Hendricks, acknowledging that Hunt has him cornered, decides to do one final swan dive off the parking garage to ensure the briefcase containing the control unit will stay as far away from Hunt’s hands as possible. With a quick smile and a steadying of the briefcase against his chest, Hendricks takes the plunge, almost immediately slamming onto a car below, before falling the rest of the way down to his death.

You see him survive the fall just long enough to watch Hunt succeed in foiling his master plan, and with that, Hendricks slowly closes his eyes and goes to Hell knowing the IMF was victorious once again.

#4 - Janik “The Bone Doctor” Vinter (Jens Hultén)

For the first two films in the series directed by Christopher McQuarrie, it was tough figuring out what to do because indeed the main antagonist, disgraced MI6 agent Solomon Lane (an outstanding Sean Harris), survives both films. We can assume he’s quickly dispatched once he’s returned to MI6 after the events of Mission: Impossible - Fallout, however since there’s no on-screen demise, I had to pull an Ethan Hunt and improvise.

So here’s Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation’s number two, the second-in-command of The Syndicate, the only villain in the series to have a wrestler-sounding nickname, The Bone Doctor. We meet him toward the beginning of the film as he’s laying out all his bone doctoring tools and beating the shit out of Ethan Hunt. Dude is just a massive tower of Swede (Jens Hultén has played a ton of memorable heavies, including one of Javier Bardem’s thugs in Skyfall) and every fight he’s in throughout the film is fantastic.

But unlike the other villains on this list, The Bone Doctor meets his end not at the hands of IMF superhero Ethan Hunt, but rather by MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson). Ilsa, who spends the whole film going back and forth between undercover MI6 agent and Syndicate stooge, finally corners Vinter in a darkened alley and the two engage in a super-slice-and-dice knife fight that absolutely rules. The ending of which sees Ilsa pulling a Xenia Onatopp on Vinter and then jamming a huge knife right through the top of his head. As the Big Swede falls dead, Ilsa rides him down to the ground and casually dismounts his shoulders, one of the smoothest post-kill moves I’ve ever seen.

#3 - Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman)

There’s no doubt in my mind that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Owen Davian is the best villain in the M:I franchise. Does it have something to do with the fact that Hoffman is still the best actor to portray a villain in the series? Probably. But the thing about movies like this, the better the villain’s performance, the better their death needs to be and thankfully, the script by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and J.J. Abrams for Mission: Impossible III totally gets that.

After terrorizing poor Ethan Hunt from beginning to end, first by killing his protégé Lindsey (Keri Russell) in brutal fashion, then causing massive casualties and injuries on the bridge where his band of goons breaks him out of IMF custody, and later by kidnapping his wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan)—dude plays with fire the whole film. By the time the story gets to Shanghai, the confirmed location of the film’s MacGuffin “the Rabbit’s Foot,” which Davian has tasked Hunt with retrieving—or else, Davian has done a lot to piss off the IMF’s Golden Boy… and pays dearly for it.

With a brain bomb implanted in Ethan’s head, like the one that iced Lindsey in the cold open, Davian and Hunt engage in a surprisingly brutal brawl in a Shanghai medical office. After some quality slobber-knocking, Ethan rushes Davian and they both smash through a window, falling out into the street where Davian is quickly hit face-on by a speeding truck. The last thing we see of this classic film villain is a single shoe gingerly hitting the ground. Good-night!

#2 - Jim Phelps (Jon Voight) (& Krieger (Jean Reno))

It’s pretty great that in the very first entry of the series we got a fantastic two-for-one Big Bad Death, even though it’s Voight that delightfully gets it worse.

After deducing that the mole inside the IMF is none other than his boss and mentor Jim Phelps, Ethan & Co. devise a plan to catch Phelps in the act of selling the coveted MacGuffin of the film, the infamous NOC List, to famed arms dealer Max (Vanessa Redgrave). This kicks off a series of events where Phelps, outed and caught on video by beloved IMF Director Kittridge (Henry Czerny), murders his wife, fellow agent and literal partner in crime, Claire (Emmanuelle Béart), then attempts to escape off the top of the train via a helicopter piloted by the also-crooked IMF agent, Krieger.

Almost making it out alive as the helicopter, still attached to the train, barrels down the Chunnel, Phelps is stuck hanging from the bottom of his escape vehicle when Hunt attaches a stick of Jack Harmon’s (an uncredited Emilio Estevez) explosive Red Light/Green Light gum to the windshield. Just as soon as Ethan can yell, “Red light! Green light!,” the gum explodes in Krieger’s face, instantly incinerating him and blasting Hunt back onto the rear of the train. Phelps isn’t so lucky.

Still attached to the copter, Phelps is able to see the explosion kill Krieger and understands he’s also about to meet a horrific end, and wouldn’t you know it? The helicopter continues to explode and drops to the ground, simultaneously, and horrifically, crushing Phelps before making him a Crispy Critter. It’s amazing and would’ve been in the top slot here, were it not for…

#1 - August Walker a.k.a. John Lark (Henry Cavill)

M:I - Fallout is such a phenomenal continuation of the Rogue Nation story and has one of the best additions to the franchise in Henry Cavill’s August Walker, the top-tier CIA assassin who is revealed to be none other than famed extremist John Lark, who has been working alongside Solomon Lane this whole time, right under the nose of CIA director Erika Sloane (a bad-ass, if underused Angela Bassett).

It’s kind of great because throughout the entire film Walker is continually upstaged or humiliated by Hunt including when he botches their initial jump into Paris, forcing Ethan to save his life before he splatters down somewhere in the middle of the 1st. But it’s only after a long (and awesome) helicopter chase through a Kashmir mountain range that this Roadrunner and Coyote duo have had enough and get down to some serious one-on-one combat.

The fight on the cliffside is fantastic and both Cruise and Cavill really give it their all. At some point, Walker is temporarily incapacitated, and I mean temporarily, when Hunt rips a part of the helicopter off and winds up spraying Walker in the face with hot oil. Disfigured and humiliated, Walker senses this may be his last rodeo and quickly switches to his “We’re All Going to Hell Tonight” protocol; he does not care if he eats shit, so long as he takes Hunt with him.

After this intense fight on the cliff, the fellas go over the edge and are hanging by a single cable. Ethan is hanging onto the cable, Walker is hanging onto both Hunt’s leg and the cable, and one of their crashed helicopters is further down, but also still attached to the cable—or rather the cable is attached to it? Anyway, Ethan shimmies off the stressed wire and grabs onto the mountainside where he’ll have an advantage—luckily us audience members have known for ages that Ethan Hunt is a skilled mountain climber.

At the last moment, Ethan gives a real, “ah, fuck it,” and tugs at the cable, loosening it from the rock and sending it flying down the cliff... where the hook that was holding everything in place rams straight into Walker’s skull, killing him instantly and slinging his body down to the ground where his corpse slowly slides into a gigundo ball of fire, engulfing him quickly into the chopper wreckage. Just one final indignity in a series of unfortunate events experienced by the crooked Mr. Walker.

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So there you go, my fave kills in every M:I film currently on home release. We’ll see what kind of carnage Dead Reckoning Part 1 brings to the screen, hopefully some more Crispy Critters! And yeah, I know there are more deaths throughout the franchise, but I really wanted to keep it to the Big Bad characters, although I’ll give a special mention to Lea Seydoux’s Sabine Moreau from Ghost Protocol. After getting into it with Jane (Paula Patton), Moreau is kicked out a window high up in the Burj Khalifa skyscraper. Wild shit.

Oh yeah, and Emilio’s bout of Elevator Action is great, but of course we know that Jack Harmon wasn’t any villain! Red Light. Green Light. Dead Light:

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part 1 is in theaters now.