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
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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?
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Back in the day, I did the same for Jack Bauer. His total kill count over 8 seasons was 252.5. The half kill came from a dog he killed in Season 2, Episode 4.
285 humans killed? No big deal.1 dog killed? He’s a monster!
It was the dog that haunted him. Everyone else had it coming.
Agreed
We still have no idea what this organization actually does when they’re not trying to kill each other. I’ve been assuming crypto.
It’s definitely an MLM scheme.(Multi-Level Murder)
Now I want a horror movie called Multi-Level Murder about a serial killer who kills with shitty legging, poorly made beauty products and over priced crap you can buy cheaper at Walmart. After they kill their victims they chop them up and store the parts in Tupperware.
Pictured: the High Table:
It’s weird to me that a franchise is so universally loved when it puts so much focus on guns. Yeah, it’s fun, it’s fantasy. But maybe a slideshow celebrating headshots doesn’t help when we’re trying to shrink the gun culture.
I imagine that John Wick is what Europeans picture when they think of visiting America.
Knowing that Americans fantasize about this so much should be enough to keep them out of our mess.
I don’t fantasize about firearms, but I do enjoy the John Wick films. And you don’t have to be a gun enthusiast to appreciate or respect firearms. Not all of us American’s are gun-toting morons that just want to get our rocks off by firing them. Some of us respect it and enjoy the sport of firearms.
Like Europeans imagine the average American owning a suit, let alone one that fits.
It’s what Texans picture when the think of visiting New York. Also, what New Yorkers picture when they think of visiting Texas.
I think part of it is that the series actually portrays guns somewhat realistically in terms of handling. While it still has Hollywood silencers, Keanu handles things like trigger discipline, cover usage and reloading extremely well. It is rare to see a film where gun handling is choreographed well.
Plus the youtube footage of Keanu and Halle Berry training at the gun range showed that they both put passion into their portrayals.
Oddly enough, I still think the remake of Assault on Precinct 13 celebrated headshots more than Wick. That film lingered on the headshots and had them happen to innocents.
This, the Wick series handles guns, and proper gun use, correctly. Much like the Movie heat, at least according to the internet lol, the reloading scenes in the street shoot out are taught by Marines
My problem with it is that so many of these gun fight sequences happen in public, and it’s treated as if collateral damage isn’t a thing. I respect the Arnold movies more. In those, tons of innocent bystanders got killed. Watching Total Recall or Commando now is so jarring, it’s obviously distasteful to see that stuff. But, at least they show actual consequences of people shooting into crowds. The Wick films are more like cartoons. I want to like them, I love Keanu, but the gun worship is getting sick at this point, in America, at least.
I get it. Though I’d note these movies tend to go for style more than realism. The whole setting is basically Vampire: The Masquerade with all the supernatural elements removed (except for the odd outright magic ninja ability briefly shown in 3). Civilians in these films might as well be video game NPCs because they only exist as scenery.
In setting, the justification for the lack of civilian casualties is a mix of ‘these people are just that skilled’, ‘the rules everyone follows are specifically to avoid civilian deaths’, and ‘the people specifically go out of their way to avoid civilian deaths’. Most notably, 3 and 4 both have sequences where Wick and the people trying to kill him only attack each other when civilians aren’t in the direct line of fire. They cut it extremely close but you can see that the fights are choreographed around them not having random casualties.
Though I will say this most recent movie basically made it so that the guns are almost trivial given the magic body armor almost everyone wears. Shots to the body are treated like punches at this point. Its almost comical that the only way to kill someone with pistols in this film is a headshot because even people in button up shirts are wearing some sort of super kelvar weave. Most of the fights are choreographed as Wick trying to disable someone to be able to get said headshot because everyone with a stated name can apparently manhandle him. Bladed weapons, blunt force trauma, arrows, and a dog did more damage overall to people wearing that stuff than guns.
Sorry, are you suggesting that articles written about John Wick’s headshots are helping to preserve gun culture?
I watched the first movie. I hate guns and gun culture and won’t be supporting this with my $$.
As a HUGE liberal weenie on guns, personally, I can see your point about gun culture. I do think it helps that the JW films (especially after the first one) walk a very deliberate line between being fantastical and having a very grounded approach to the moment-to-moment mechanics of violence. (It helps that, past the first film, there’s little to no sadism in what Wick does; a lot of the joy is in the efficiency of how he fights.) If you’re opposed to any cinema that’s centered primarily in violence, there’s little for you in the franchise. But if you’ve accepted the basic premise (which I have, for good or ill), I think the John Wick films approach violence in fascinating, funny, brilliant ways.
I think you also have to factor in how the series separates the broader Continental / High Table world from civilians. Everyone who gets hurt or killed deserves it and they seemingly take care to conduct their business away from normal people on the street. It’s nonsense, but if you’re complaining about realism in the Wickverse then I’m not sure what to say.
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I did a presentation for university on the number of fatalities in Commando which included having to count them all beforehand. I think from what I recall, Arnold killed about 100 people and 6 got killed by others.
Well yeah but they had his daughter, and she was Alissa Milano. You’d have done the same thing.
Plot twist which isn’t really, I post here and Reddit so much that what daughter are we talking about here?Corollary, so clumsy tbat I would have accidentally shot myself during the suiting up with weapons montage.
John Matrix > John Wick.
All I know is that there is a 3 hour and 45 minute first cut of this…I want it. The body count would be epic!
What no slide for each individual kill? Getting lazy around here.
The AI that generates this content wanted to much robo-dollars
It will never stop to weird me out that they want us believe any Russians would call a man Baba Yaga and meant it to be terrifying. Baba means old woman – they couldn’t have picked more gendered character if they tried – and there is no way it would be taken seriously. It’s clear they just picked the only thing they heard about.
The funny thing is there is a Russian folklore villain who would fit so much better – Koschei the Deathless would be perfect name for what they set up John Wick to be. He is said to be unkillable after all.
Father Mushroom or GTFO!
I could see him getting in on this. He does get bored
Does he get bored?
He gets bored.
See, religion’d have more followers these days if we kept those gods. None of that love-thy-neigbour Judaeo-Christian crap. No, we need more gods who will, say, take the form of a caterpillar and make your daughter fall in love with a wheel of cheese because they felt like it.
I’ve not seen the films, does he perhaps scoot around the swamp in his house in ducks feet? Or does he snatch children who are left unattended by open windows?
Baba Yaga sounds vaguely familiar to western ears, while Koschei is practically unheard of. ‘Baba’ can very much be used as a pejorative, implying terrible ugliness, something akin to ‘crone’. One could totally envision a gangster having a nickname ‘Baba Yaga’. To explain a bit more, every self-respecting gangster in Slavic countries has an official nickname and these can be quite ironically self-deprecating such as ‘fool’ or ‘monkey’ or ‘Šiptar’ a pejorative term for Albanians used for a Serb gangster.
There is a much bigger howler in John Wick. Russians are Orthodox Christian, yet John Wick raids an ostensibly Catholic church complete with a beardless priest. It would be like seeing a mid-western preacher dressed like a cardinal.
English is a language without grammatical gender so such things are easier to ignore but even then you wouldn’t call a guy Evil Old Witch and expect people to think that’s the scariest shit. Slavic languages are very gendered and with the misogyny inherent to gangster groups (even without getting to the whole prison rape culture degradation) this would automatically be more insulting and disrespectful than scary. At best it could be sarcastic but not as something you whisper in fear in the dark. Also note that the English equivalent they use is Bogeyman.Yes, clearly there was no Russians involved in the first movie and now they’re stuck with what they picked.
You’re literally languagesplaining Slavic to a native speaker of a Slavic language. If I say it’s not a big deal, it’s not a big f***ing deal. ‘Baba Jaga’ is not big in Serbia, but you could easily imagine a gangster nicknamed after its Serbian counterpart ‘Babaroga’ (Horn Hag).
Slavic languages have a long history of masculinizing feminine nouns. Words such as ‘judge’(sudija) and (male) ‘servant’(sluga) were once feminine in Serbian, but then natural gender began to bleed into the grammatical gender, so these words are now masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural because the singular is of course far more often used. Male names ending in ‘a’, most famously Nikola (Tesla or Jokić), but also many others (Nemanja, Sava, Saša, Aleksa…), follow the same pattern. Take the guy nicknamed ‘fool’, Vlada Budala. ‘Budala’ is a feminine noun in Serbian, so if I ran into some random fool, I would say ‘Rekla je budala…’ (The fool said…), using the feminine form of the past participle whether the fool was male or female, but if I was talking about Vlada himself, I would say ‘Rekao je Budala…’ (Fool said…) using the masculine form of the past participle because now the noun is treated as a male name. Note also the difference in capitalization.
Dude, I’m Polish. When I was a kid all the witches in fairytales were Baba Yaga to me (even when I wondered how her house can be made of gingerbread and be on a chicken leg at the same time). Even our hide and seek countdown went “Raz, dwa, trzy, Baba Jaga patrzy” (One, two, three, Baba Yaga is looking). So yes, I know all about the difference between the gender of the noun and the person it describes. And that -a ending doesn’t always denote feminine. But we are not talking about names or titles here. We are talking about comparison to a mythological bogeyman to instil fear and you should know, as well as I do, how strong the need to match genders is in such case. It’s instinctive (and supported by research on many gendered languages). Unless, you mean it ironically (that Old Witch dude, him).
I just assume that John Wick is — as this slideshow clearly demonstrates — so pants-wettingly effective at making people dead that when he decided to go by Baba Yaga no one felt like arguing the point. Sort of like:“Baba Yaga? Isn’t that the old witch in the fairy stories?” “Yes, but we’ve literally just watched him kill twenty-two people with a ballpoint pen, so if he wants to be Baba Yaga, let him be Baba Yaga. We’ll make up the scary backstory later. And don’t make eye contact.”
Should have gone with Czernobog.
Guess my high school latin is a bit rusty.
I got exhausted by John Wick’s schtick in the second installment. At this point, I just don’t care to spend 2+ hours watching people shoot each other in the face in the middle of a crowded nightclub, where no one gets killed except the bad guys. It’s strange to me than in the era of mass shootings in America, we’re still SO entertained by gun deaths that we need 10 hours of movie (so far, I’m sure this franchise isn’t stopping soon) that basically just boils down to nothing but shooting people in the face repeatedly, usually in crowded public settings.
To be fair, I remember a lot of the discourse around the first film being “…this is crazy violent but they killed his dog.”
After that it was just a bunch of acceptable targets. The movies go out of their way to showcase how everyone Wick intends to kill are either pretty horrible people in positions of relative power or nameless henchpeople who exist only to catch bullets. The setting is like someone expanded Gotham City to an entire world and then made sure everyone followed some preset rules.
You don’t like John Wick, which is fine. Some of us do, which is also fine.Trying to sermonize about gun violence in movies is fucking stupid.
I just don’t care to spend 2+ hours watching people shoot each other in the face in the middle of a crowded nightclub, where no one gets killed except the bad guys.Isn’t just about everyone on screen a “bad guy”? Even the protagonist is a killer for hire who just retired from murder for a few years.
Except these clubs are full of hundreds of rolling people who due to the music volume and lights can’t even hear what’s happening right next to them. Unless they see a head explode firsthand they doubtful have any idea what’s going on around them.
Um… what? I’ve been front row at Motorhead, AC/DC, Big Sugar and Supersuckers. Some of those shows left me dizzy, they were so loud. But I still would have heard multiple gunshots going off around me. THAT is fucking loud.
Agreed.
Luckily, I live in a country where we dealt with mass shootings like adults, so I can continue to enjoy these!
Lucky! Here in the U.S.A. we refuse to be deterred by facts or reason.
Alrighty. Here’s someone that put together a curated list and presented in a great sanky visualization. They came up with 287 kills so it’s similar and traces the kills by location, weapon, and character or group.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/zach.bowders/viz/JohnWickTrilogy_16497885906130/JWT
Oh, that’s really neat! Weirdly, I also counted 14 kills initially in the very first fight at his house, but the movie is pretty clear about there being 12. The films like to do a thing where JW will shoot a guy a couple of times but he’ll get back up for one last hit that can kind of juke the count a bit.
Okay, I just have to ask: are you a fan of the Youtube channel, Dead Meat? Because this whole article (but especially the kill-on-average’s) has some extreme Kill Count energy, and I mean that as a total compliment.
Its strange. I have seen the first movie and I believe I watched the second one but I can not, for the life of me, remember much about them. I remember his wife dies, some thugs kill his dog, rampage ensues. But that is it. Something about a magic hotel that takes coins for guns too maybe. Nothing from the this franchise stuck with me. The second one I know I watched but I remember nothing.Maybe I have to give them another watch, I do not recall hating either.
I love these movies
I think we can say that John Wick inherits Dean Winters Mayhem title, am I correct?