Baba Yaga bodycount: Here's how many people John Wick actually kills in the first three John Wicks

We tallied every single Keanu kill in John Wick 1, 2, and 3, rating the most satisfying murders and bloodiest bloodbaths

By William Hughes | March 24, 2023 | 12:00pm

Film Features John

Baba Yaga bodycount: Here's how many people John Wick actually kills in the first three John Wicks

John Wick: Chapter 4 Photo: Lionsgate

If there’s one thing that everyone in the ludicrously assassin-stuffed universe of the John Wick movies can seemingly agree on, it’s that John Wick is very good at killing people. It’s the first thing anyone ever says about Keanu Reeves’ perpetually unsuccessful retired killer: John Wick is great at murder. John Wick is the guy you send to kill the boogeyman. John Wick cannot be trusted near your stationery cabinet. Don’t kill John Wick’s dog, Theon Greyjoy; you will not enjoy what happens next. (He kills you.)

But with John Wick: Chapter 4 heading into theaters this weekend, we had to ask ourselves: How good is John Wick at killing people, precisely? We know he does a lot of murders across the first three Wick movies. But how many? Can we express it as a rate of murders per minute? Or Greyhound buses loaded up with the bodies of his victims? And what are his most brutal and brilliant kills?

And so, we embarked on an extremely scientific survey of Reeves and director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick (2014), John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017), and John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum (2019). Which is to say that we watched all three movies back-to-back, and made a note every time John Wick totally murders someone—and an extra note every time we went “Oh, fuck!” after he did so. (There were a lot of margin note “Oh fuck!”s.) The end result was the following report, broken up by movie, highlighting bloodiest scenes and best kills, and answering the question: What is the Baba Yaga’s official on-screen bodycount?

First kill, John Wick: Home Invasion, Part 2, at 29:25

The original John Wick spends a good long portion of its initial run-time setting up its premise and/or establishing puppy cuteness. (Followed swiftly by, uh … puppy mortality.) Instead of seeing John shoot people in the head, the film sells his sheer lethality through little touches, like the horrified “Oh” that Russian mob boss Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist) emits when told exactly who his son Iosef has made an implacable enemy of. It’s nearly a full half-hour into the movie before we get to see the Baba Yaga in action ourselves, as a dozen of Viggo’s goons make a desperate pre-emptive attempt to cut Wick’s vengeance short, by invading his home for the second time in as many days. At which point, yeah: He shoots them in the fucking head, establishing his go-to maneuver for swift bad-guy dispatching for the rest of these films. (There are a few struggling stragglers, though, including one dude who gets an early, brutal neck crack across the Wicks’ otherwise immaculate kitchen counter—the first “Oh fuck” on our list, by the by.) One dinner reservation for 12, on its way.

Most kills, John Wick: The Red Circle

If we’re being 100 percent honest, the first John Wick can be a little sluggish in spots, having yet to fully embrace the comic book silliness that powers the franchise’s more enthusiastic later installments. But John’s mid-movie assault on the Red Circle nightclub, where Iosef is hiding from his due vengeance, is textbook Wick: a hyper-violent, strobe-light-filled techno murder rave that sees John eventually send 28 souls straight to Russian Mobster hell. The pacing is perfect, too, as Wick starts the fight in stealth mode, knifing dudes as he tries to track Iosef down. (Including one knife-up-through-the-jaw kill on some poor random mook that went right in the “Oh fuck” pile.) But restraint can only last so long in the John Wickiverse, and soon it’s shoot-o-clock, setting the tone for the rest of this series as Wick goes full video game protagonist on the next 23 dudes to get in his way. There’s even a mini-boss, in the form of Daniel Bernhardt’s Kirill (the only fighter, besides fellow assassin Perkins, who fights John on his own level in this movie). After a brief scuffle, he stops Wick’s rampage cold by hurling him off a balcony. (Don’t worry; Kirill gets his a few minutes later, choked to death with Wick’s bound hands around his neck.)

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Most satisfying kill, John Wick: Iosef Tarasov

There’s nothing especially flashy about the way John Wick kills car thief/dog killer/unwitting instigator of an ocean of bloodshed Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen) once he finally tracks him down. (Having previously employed a “borrowed” sniper rifle to divest the criminal princeling of all his surrounding guards.) Wick barely even looks at him, actually, dispatching the whiny wannabe with a quick headshot before he can even finish his final complaint about how it was “Just a fuck’n—” Still, in a world where even the most hardened of professional killers tend to have some redeeming or honorable qualities, it’s hard not to feel good seeing the puppy kicker get his just desserts.Honorable mention: Viggo Tarasov’s second-in-command Avi, mostly because it’s fun to see Dean Winters shit himself as he realizes what the Baba Yaga is about to do to him (i.e., shoot him, and then hit him with his car, and then let him get hit by a second, even angrier car). Sorry, Mr. Mayhem.

Total killcount and stats, John Wick

There’s a little bit of fuzziness to this tally, on account of how, in the last big fight scene—when Wick is trying to prevent Viggo from escaping via helicopter—he runs an SUV full of goons off a cliff, with an inconclusive bodycount. (We said 4, could be as many as 6.) But we’re comfortable enough saying that John Wick kills 76 people in John Wick. That’s a kill every 1.3 minutes—not bad considering that John doesn’t start shooting people until a third of the way through the movie. Also, 56 of those kills were headshots, i.e., exactly enough to fill one Greyhound bus, to capacity, for the trip to the afterlife. (Everyone else will have to take a cab.)

First kill, John Wick: Chapter 2: Getting back his car, at 5:25

Speaking of cabs… This one is actually a little tricky, because John Wick 2's energetic action opening—in which our beautiful Baba Yaga attacks the Tarasov’s taxi company to get his beloved car back, while Peter Stormare gleefully out-acts a high-impact car chase—is one of the few sequences in the whole trilogy where John isn’t explicitly going for kills. (This is basically diplomacy, John Wick style.) For sure, though, some of these dudes absotively beef it: We’re timing our count to an audible *snap* from one of the guys John punches while he’s already down, but you can adjust as needed: There’s the guy he garrotes, the guy he hits with a car … the other guy he hits with a car … Choose Your Own Murder, basically. But we’re calling it at a tasteful, conservative, and “peaceful” 4 opening deaths.

Most kills, John Wick: Chapter 2: The Museum Fight

If we’re counting kills purely by location, the actual winner of this category would be the sequel’s Rome sequence, where Wick first infiltrates the coronation of newly forged Crime Queen Gianna D’Antonio, kills her, and then fights his way right back out. But we’re pedantically counting that as two fights, because it runs as two sequences: The battle against Gianna’s barn-door-after-the-horse-done-galloped bodyguards (19 kills, including Gianna herself, who John shoots after she slits her wrists), and then the goons sent by her brother Santino to cover up the hit (another 38).Instead, we’re giving the nod to the film’s final big fight scene, as John assaults a New York art museum to take his Wick-y vengefuls out on Santino. For a fight that very pointedly starts with just 7 bullets in John’s gun—a plot point the third movie will never let you forget—John Wick sure does kill a lot of fucking people here: 46 in total, concluding with Ruby Rose’s Ares, the only one of the whole crew not to get shot in the head.Re-watching John Wick 2, one of the things that becomes clear about these movies’ action choreography is how blissfully, well, clear it always is: There’s a reason we can do this kind of itemized count of falling bodies, and it’s because Stahelski gives each mini-encounter at least a little bit of weight. No mook is just a mook; every body is accounted for, every head dutifully tapped. There’s nothing in the museum sequence quite as good as the bit in Rome where Wick pins a guy down with the shotgun he’s actively reloading, then fatally blasts him at point-blank range—but it’s still a demonstration of the grounded principles that allow these movies to hit so much harder than so much of their competition.

Most satisfying kills, John Wick: Chapter 2: The Assassin Montage

And then also, sometimes, they just get silly. One of the great things about John Wick: Chapter 2 is how it builds on the absurd premise of clandestine murder hub The Continental from the first movie, sketching out a world where every third hot dog vendor or dog walker you pass on the street is secretly a professional killer. That reaches its natural conclusion halfway through Chapter 2, in a time-jumping montage that shows seemingly the entirety of New York City attempting to kill John Wick. Besides finally giving us not just one, but two on-screen kills via everyone’s favorite graphite writing implement, this sequence is simply a blast, with complex fights that foreshadow the more martial arts-based battling of Chapter 3. And while we’d be remiss to pass over the guy whose death is memorialized in our notes simply as “taint knife,” an especial highlight is the street violinist (played by MCU stuntwoman Heidi Moneymaker) who gets the drop on John, inflicting a near-fatal gutwound on him with the gun concealed inside her violin—before getting her neck brutally snapped.Honorable mention: When John Wick asks a villain to be smug, it doesn’t go about it with half measures: Santino D’Antonio’s quick and messy death might kick off some serious consequences (and seriously tedious globe-trotting) in John Wick: Chapter 3, but Riccardo Scamarcio certainly earns his bullet here.

Total killcount and statistics, John Wick: Chapter 2

It’s like they say: Go big or go home. In his second run at theaters, John Wick kills 114 people. Even with a slightly longer run-time, that averages out to a kill every 1.07 minutes—the highest rate in the franchise to date.A massive 107 of those deaths fall under the “shot” category (although John’s use of a shotgun in Rome means some of them aren’t headshots). That won’t quite fill two full Greyhound buses—which is nice, because it means “taint knife” guy can get a full row to himself, which, we assure you, he will need.

First kill, John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum: Ernest checks out, at 8:24

Cheaters never prosper—and sometimes they get a big ol’ book driven halfway through their skulls. Such is the fate of hasty hitman Ernest (played with undeniable tallness by NBA player Boban Marjanović) as he attempts to jump the line on John’s rapidly ascending bounty in the New York Public Library in the opening minutes of John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum; Latin Makes It Sound Cool (It’s Also A Word For Bullets). As the longest film in the initial trilogy, Parabellum understands it needs to offer some red meat from the jump, and Ernest is just the first course—while also establishing, via some very long-legged kicks, that the third Wick movie is going to see John get his ass handed to him quite a bit more often than what we’ve seen before.

Most kills, John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum: Casablanca

This is, as far as we can reckon, the only battle in the first three John Wick movies in which John Wick is not the most lethal participant: That honor instead goes to Halle Berry’s Sofia Al-Azwar, who, with gun in hand and Good Dogs Akimbo, lays waste to an absolutely massive number of High Table goons in a Casablanca bazaar as the duo tries to make their escape. As our remit was only to tally John’s kills, we let Sofia’s various headshots, animal maulings, and all-purpose murders go untracked. (But deeply celebrated; in addition to being the most lethal, this might also just be the best fight scene in the entire franchise. It’s fun, it turns out, to watch dogs do parkour so they can bite a bad guy in the testicles.) John spends a decent chunk of this fight out of focus, but we still counted 31 kills at his own hands/guns—beating out the film’s final battle, against armored High Table warriors in the deconsecrated Continental, by just one kill.

Most satisfying kills, John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum: Hurled knives and horse kicks

The Wick films have always had a sense of humor about their use of violence—there is, after all, a reason both 2 and 3 open with explicit nods to slapstick master Buster Keaton. But Parabellum truly embraces it, especially in an early sequence that asks the tantalizing question, “What if John Wick fought some dudes in a room filled with infinite knives?” A huge shout-out is due to the movie’s sound team, which makes every hurled blade in the subsequent fight—and there are a lot of hurled blades in the subsequent fight—a little comic marvel, as they thwack into knives, or clothes, or, more often than not, into some poor dude’s skull. (Ditto whoever perfected the glorious-awful sound of a horse kicking a guy dead in the face, which happens twice in quick succession during this same opening escape sequence.)Honorable mentions: The film’s final battles, against Mark Dacascos’ Zero and his crew of enthusiastic John Wick fanboys, go on a bit long for our tastes. But Dacascos has undeniable charisma in the part; the moments when he drops his badass attitude to geek out over fighting John Wick! are genuinely winning, and so we’d feel bad leaving him out of the death tally.We also have a section in our notes labeled “BRG,” which, if we recall, stands for “Bike Rube Goldberg sequence,” i.e., when John Wick shoots you and then your motorcycle hits another motorcycle and everybody dies, and that’s pretty hard to say no to, too.