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

Screenshot: John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum

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.