Before we begin - yes, I know it's not real.
Payback really is the archetypal B-show. It doesn't have the tradition and name appeal of Wrestlemania, Summerslam or Survivor Series, or a gimmick theme to add interest, like with Money in the Bank, TLC or -God forbid - Hell in a Cell (I remember when Hell in a Cell matches were only used to end particularly vicious feuds, not because it's October). It was just a bunch of matches, in a sequence. Thankfully, all of the matches ranged from above average to excellent, which all added up to make Payback the WWE show of the year by a long way.
(Note: Seeing as this is my first wrestling review, any industry terms that may be unfamiliar will be explained at the bottom of the page)
Match 1: Wade Barrett (c) vs. The Miz vs. Curtis Axel (w/ Paul Heyman) (Triple Threat Match for the Intercontinental Championship)
Interesting choice for the opener, considering that at the moment the IC title has as much prestige as the National Television Awards (Waterloo Road as Most Popular Drama over Sherlock? Kiss my ringpiece, British public), and that none of the three men involved are known as particularly flashy of high-octane performers. But this match ended up impressing me; it was nothing special, but was a solid pro wrestling match with some cool moments and an inventive finish. Curtis Axel was the star of the show here, and the weird thing was that he wasn't even meant to be in the match, but then Fandango got a concussion doing the paso doble too vociferously (or something). His tactics in the match fit very well with his character; in recent weeks he's been scumming wins over John Cena and Triple H via countout, disqualification, Vince McMahon stopping the match just to screw with his son-in-law, and Cena having better things to do and leaving the ring to stare at an ambulance. Doesn't do wonders for the guy's credibility, but then he's not beating Cena or Triple H in a straight fight. So Axel, true to form, played it very sneaky, lurking outside the ring conferring with new manager Paul Heyman, biding his time and waiting for an opportunity to pounce, which was a refreshing change from the usual 'one guy gets knocked out of the ring and mysteriously incapacitated for three to five minutes while the other two have a normal match' template for three-ways. The finish played into this dynamic, with Miz having Barrett trapped in the Figure-Four Leglock, and Axel stealing the win by sliding in and pinning Barrett's shoulders to the mat just before he could tap to the submission hold. So now he has a belt, which should help the credibility thing.
A couple more points on this match: firstly, Miz as a face actually working for once. I haven't been the biggest fan of his face run, firstly because his character is still the same douchebag as it was when he was a heel, only now he insults bad guys, and secondly because he's no more than passable in the ring. The Figure-Four always gets the crowd going, but that's mainly because of its association with the legendary Ric Flair. But in this match, there was a point where he got back in the ring and laid waste to the other two guys in an intense and exciting manner, and the crowd went wild! More of this, please. Another thing to remark upon is the reaction Curtis Axel gleaned from the crowd. Chicago crowds are usually full of smarks who know their wrestling history, and Axel is the son of the late Mr. Perfect, a very well-respected performer. So the crowd was very much behind him, despite his being a heel, and the pop when he hit his dad's old finishing move, the Perfect-Plex, was one of the biggest of the night. The commentators sold it as a big win, especially it being on Father's Day, and there was really no indication that Axel was being excoriated for winning the match in such an underhanded way. It was presented as a joyous moment, which may just indicate that in front of a Chicago crowd, all bets are off when it comes to character alignments.
Wade Barrett was just sort of there, which has really been the story of his title reign. Rating: **3/4
Match 2: Kaitlyn (c) vs. AJ Lee (w/ Big E. Langston) (WWE Divas Championship)
Listen; mainstream women's wrestling in the USA has never been good. Luckily in the modern age you can go and watch Manami Toyota vs. Kyoko Inoue on Youtube, or something similar. The WWE generally hires female wrestlers for their looks, gives them very few storylines, and books short matches. But sometimes you get an exception to the rule, and this was it. This match had actually been over a year in the making, ever since AJ turned on her former best friend back in early 2012, for having the temerity to (correctly) suggest that her boyfriend Daniel Bryan was an emotionally manipulative jerk (Note: At the present time, Daniel Bryan is a beloved fan favourite. Such is the fast-flowing nature of wrestling storytelling). Things came to a head when Kaitlyn began receiving texts and gifts from a secret admirer, which turned out to be AJ trolling her with the help of her heavy Big E. Langston. Then Kaitlyn went ape on Smackdown and slapped a referee about. So we have an evil challenger playing mind games and getting inside the head of a champion who's beginning to lose her composure, and a friendship rent asunder. When you give two female wrestlers an actual storyline, and a whole ten minutes to put on a match that plays into it, guess what? It's entertaining. It's not hard.
Let me be straight; this wasn't an amazing match. But by the standards of WWE women's matches, it was incredible. It was wrestled smartly, there were some impressive reversal sequences (a crossbody into an attempted tilt-a-whirl slam into an octopus stretch springs to mind), and Kaitlyn's spear is better than most male wrestlers who've used the move as a finisher. I'm looking at you, Edge. The finish of the match played into the story. Kaitlyn speared AJ out of her boots and could have pinned her, but decided to inflict more punishment on her tormentor. This backfired, and AJ locked on another Octopus Stretch, to which Kaitlyn tapped out. Shockingly, Big E. Langston didn't get involved at all, preferring instead to stand at ringside with his arms folded throughout the match, which will never not be awesome.
After the match, Kaitlyn began to weep, to which the Chicago crowd, ever contrarian, responded by booing and chanting 'You Tapped Out'. I don't think that's the reaction they were going for. One guy yelled 'THERE'S NO CRYING IN WRESTLING!', which leads me to believe he's never seen Ric Flair vs. Shawn Michaels. But I think we've learned that wrestling fans don't like open displays of emotions that aren't righteous anger. I'm not sure how much of a fan of the 'secret admirer' part of the feud I was (you generally don't get a story like that with the gender roles reversed, thought there are precedents), but at least we got a fleshed-out storyline for WWE's women, even if it didn't pass the Bechdel Test.
Oh, and Jerry Lawler on commentary at one point espoused the damaging fallacy that all women secretly hate each other. I know I shouldn't expect anything less from the old dinosaur, but if he does it again I'm going to hire Kenta Kobashi to fly to Memphis and give him the Burning Hammer. Rating: ***
Match 3: Dean Ambrose (c) vs. Kane (United States Championship)
This was the weakest match of the night, but still perfectly fine. I will always have a soft spot for Kane and his destructive rampages in many a Royal Rumble, and I do love his current character of 'surprisingly reasonable and caring fire demon from Hell' (Kane doing 'normal people things' is always funny), but he's never been the greatest wrestler in the world by any stretch. What made this match still compelling was the dynamic between the performers, and Ambrose's mannerisms played into their shared history; Ambrose's heel group The Shield put Kane's brother The Undertaker out of action. Ambrose is great at playing a creepy weirdo (think Heath Ledger's Joker) and at one point in the match he parroted Taker's trademark throat-slitting gesture and attempted his 'Old School' rope-walking manoeuvre, which Kane ended up reversing. Angered, Kane lost his composure and tried to slam Ambrose through the announcers' table on the outside, which Ambrose reversed into a DDT, after which he slid back into the ring and won by countout. Again, storytelling through wrestling; an unspectacular and fairly plodding match elevated by good character work.
True to form, the crowd frequently chanted 'Let's Go Ambrose'. But they didn't boo Kane. You can't boo Kane. He's not quite face and not quite heel; he's transcended the simple binary, like a 7-foot masked Jacques Derrida. Rating: **1/4
Match 4: Dolph Ziggler (w/ Big E. Langston and AJ Lee) (c) vs. Alberto del Rio (w/ Ricardo Rodriguez) (World Heavyweight Championship)
I know I've been going on about the importance of storytelling, but I'm a firm believer that a truly great wrestling match cannot just rely on the moves involved. Case in point; Do Fixer (Ryo Saito, Genki Horiguchi and Dragon Kid) vs. Blood Generation (Masato Yoshino, Naruki Doi and CIMA) from ROH in 2006. A visually dazzling and very fast-paced match featuring six great athletes, featuring some impressive high-flying. And it's honestly kind of boring. I would much rather watch a match between lesser athletes who are not just throwing out moves for 25 minutes until it's time for someone to win, but who are using their moves to tell a story. In the last three matches on Payback, we saw three examples of very different stories being told. The fourth match was the best on the show in terms of narrative, even if technically it was less than perfect.
Dolph Ziggler cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase the night after Wrestlemania, taking advantage of an injured del Rio, in what was honestly the best 2-minute match I've ever seen. Thereafter, he suffered a concussion, and was on the shelf for a while, which meant that del Rio had to wait to get his hands on him. Another thing about Dolph Ziggler; despite being a heel, he gets cheered by a sizeable minority of the crowd (this happens a lot amongst smarks nowadays; see also Punk, CM). The noise when he emerged to challenge del Rio to win the title in the first place was deafening; the night after Wrestlemania is notorious for attracting the hardest of the hardcore fans. Chicago, as I've said, is full of smarks, so you can guess what happened. Ziggler - the heel - got cheered to the rafters. And reactions like this put wrestling companies in a difficult position. Do you stick with the story you're trying to tell, or do you adjust a wrestler's alignment based on how the crowd are responding to the narrative you're trying to present? Obviously, you don't do the latter all the time, especially in front of a Chicago crowd, who in the first match cheered a man who is accompanied by a known shyster and who lives on undeserved victories, simply because his dad was a good wrestler. But Ziggler's been attracting cheers for ages, and del Rio hasn't been working that well as a face (probably because his face character is very generic). Sometimes, audiences force the hands of the writers.
That's what happened here. The story WWE told was thus; del Rio was desperate to win the title, so desperate that he targeted the recently-concussed Ziggler with an array of kicks to the head. The doctor (and his seconds) asked if he wanted to stop the match, but Ziggler fought on and looked like he was going to make a comeback, until del Rio finally ended the match with another head kick. Ziggler gained the sympathy of the audience, despite having been previously cast as the villain (he did a brilliant job of selling the neurological trauma of the kicks), and del Rio looked like a heel for ruthlessly decimating a stricken man. The crowd did a lot of the writers' job for them by cheering the heel and booing the face, and by the end of the match Ziggler was established as a plucky face, and del Rio as a dickhead who went too far. There were a few iffy moments in the match (Ziggler messed up a Cross Armbreaker counter into a Fameasser), but the action was great, and Ziggler's performance as a man in peril terrific. Rating: ***1/2
(Note: del Rio gave a promo after the match celebrating his win, just like a face would, while the crowd booed him vociferously. On Raw, he acted much more heelish, blaming the crowd for never having taken to him, and cheering the villainous Ziggler over him. I thought that they'd go the direction of having him as a champion trying to play to the crowd while unaware that they hate him, but then they already have John Cena for that.)
Match 5: CM Punk (w/ Paul Heyman) vs. Chris Jericho
This match was just on the card to sell tickets. CM Punk is from Chicago, where he is loved like no other wrestler. He'd been out of action since losing to The Undertaker at Wrestlemania, but made his triumphant return here in front of his hometown crowd. Unlike the previous bout, there was no story behind this, other than both men trying to prove who is the best (Note: In Japan, this is every match).
Despite this, the action was superb, which was expected, as both competitors are excellent wrestlers. There were many believable false finishes, reversals and submission counters, which had me enthralled. CM Punk, despite sporting sideburns not seen since the days of Martin van Buren, was cheered crazily, and put in a great performance; even his top-rope elbow drop, which is usually pretty dodgy, came off well. Jericho played heel a little bit (in front of this crowd, he had to), and provided a strong adversary for Punk to overcome in his return match. The finish made Jericho look tough, as it needed two finishers to beat him; Punk hit the GTS, which knocked Jericho into the corner, so Punk grabbed him and hit the move again. This provided redemption for Wrestlemania, where the same thing happened, only with The Undertaker, after the first GTS, thinking 'fuck your finisher, I'm literally a zombie', no-selling it and Tombstoning the hell out of him. So this match did everything it needed to to re-establish Punk as a major player in the WWE; it was long, and felt significant because of all the finisher kick-outs, and gave him a win over a credible opponent in an excellent match. The only criticism I'd make is that the result was never in doubt (as only idiots would book a returning hometown hero to lose his first match after an absence), and also that they could have made more of Heyman's interference almost inadvertently costing Punk the match, if, as I suspect, they're going to split them up as a team (Note: they did). But those are minor quibbles, and for me, this was the best match of the night. Rating: ****
Match 6: The Shield (Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns) (c) vs. Daniel Bryan and Randy Orton (WWE Tag Team Championship)
This, on the other hand, was slightly disappointing. The problem was that the match felt too short for what it was, like they went straight from the feeling-out stages to the finish. It wasn't as good as the six-man tag matches that we see from The Shield on a weekly basis on free TV. Daniel Bryan was as awesome as ever (and the crowd bloody loved him, despite his being a face), but Randy Orton was a bit of a detriment to the match. The issue with Orton is that he only periodically looks like he isn't going through the motions. I thought he'd turned a corner with the surprisingly great match at Extreme Rules against the Big Show. He looked energized, got the crowd fired up, and put on an entertaining bout. He even brought back the Punt! But here he was seemingly wrestling at 70% speed, although there was one awesome moment where he caught Rollins coming off the top rope and powerslammed him (Randy Orton's powerslam is a thing of beauty and is better than the RKO. Discuss). I loved the finish though, which did a lot to further the tensions between Bryan and Orton. Bryan did his usual dive to the outside, but The Shield moved out the way, and he accidentally clattered into Orton. Later in the match, Reigns was going for a spear on Orton, so he shoved Bryan in the way rather than take the hit himself. Orton gave Reigns the RKO, but Rollins threw Orton out of the ring and beat the stricken Bryan with a brutal-looking stomp to the head. So Orton looks heelish for taking revenge on Bryan for what was an honest mistake (which is good if they're going to be feuding, as the WWE would be moronic if they made the wildly popular Bryan the heel), and The Shield look like a cogent team by comparison. But this wasn't the best match these four could have done by a long shot. Rating: **3/4
(Before I review the main event, just a few notes on backstage happenings. Triple H confronted Curtis Axel after his title win and gave him the brush off, which makes Axel look like he isn't on Trips' level, though to be honest he isn't. Triple H and Vince McMahon had a confrontation, as Vince wants Triple H to retire for the good of his health. Vince, trying to play reverse psychologist, said to Triple H that he could have a match with Curtis Axel, so Triple H said no just to spite him. I'd ask for a refund on that 'Manipulation for Dummies' book. Also, ROB VAN DAM IS COMING BACK YES YES YES. RVD was a favourite of mine back in 2002-3 for doing loads of cool flippy stuff, wearing awesome leotards, and being in my all-time favourite odd-couple tag team with Kane (I'm sorry, Booker T and Goldust, but that's the way it has to be). The last time I saw him wrestle was last year in TNA and he looked pretty damn slow compared to in his pomp, but I can't see any harm in having him back as a nostalgia act. Plus, my girlfriend informs me that when the announcement 'RVD returns at Money in the Bank' came up on screen, I looked like a kid in a candy store.)
Main Event: John Cena (c) vs. Ryback (Three Stages of Hell Match for the WWE Championship)
Firstly, props to the contrarians of Chicago for booing both men during the introductions. That'll learn 'em. Look, just pick someone to cheer, won't you? I know neither man is a smark favourite, but cheer whoever you hate less. As Noam Chomsky said, "Choosing the lesser of two evils isn't a bad thing. The cliche makes it sound bad, but it's a good thing. You get less evil."
John Cena gets a lot of flak for his supposed lack of ring ability, but he's really not bad at all. His TV matches are generally very samey, and he could sell a bit (and sometimes a lot) more, especially after the end of a match, but his high-profile matches are invariably good; I'd still rate his match with CM Punk on Raw earlier this year as the best match I've seen in 2013. Ryback is a big dude with some debilitating-looking power moves, and his character since he turned heel (basically, master troll) has been very entertaining. However, this match didn't fill me with confidence when it was announced as a Lumberjack Match followed by a Tables Match followed by an Ambulance Match. I love tables more than Ikea, but lumberjack matches are often fairly dull because the presence of men around the ring throwing the participants back inside limits what you can do with a match, and I can only think of one good ambulance match (Kane vs. Shane McMahon from 2003). But this ended up being a perfectly serviceable main event.
Stage 1 featured the best spot of the night, as Ryback ended up in the middle of a 40-man brawl on the outside, and Cena climbed up on the top rope, jumped onto EVERYONE, and they all toppled like dominoes. It was a really great visual. You can show me technical wrestling between Dean Malenko and Chris Benoit or a whole host of World of Sport guys, and I can appreciate the artistry but there's a chance it'll leave me cold (and I know that this may seem heretical, what with my being British). But you give me John Cena jumping on a pile of dudes, and I'll be wowed. That probably says a lot about me, but you can't deny that the crowd loves it, and as I've said, it was a memorable moment. Ryback won the first fall when he reversed Cena's STF into the Shell Shock (which may well be my favourite finishing move not enacted by Brock Lesnar) and pinned him.
Stage 2 was a tables match, and Ryback didn't screw about, getting his wood out straight away. The problem with the second stage of any 2/3 falls match is that we know we're getting a third stage (the ambulance parked next to the ramp was a bit of a giveaway). But Cena and Ryback did enough to keep it interesting, mostly by way of Ryback trying to obliterate Cena by using his freakish strength to throw the steel steps at him. Both times Cena dodged, and a table got shattered into splinters, which was, again, a cool visual, really bringing home the fact that Ryback is dangerous. Ryback tried to Shell Shock Cena again, but Cena countered into the Attitude Adjustment and slammed him through a table. Next.
Stage 3 started with Ryback recovering and powerbombing Cena through the announcers' table (shockingly, not the Spanish one). Thereafter, the match took place on the ramp, which must have sucked for the live crowd. Any suggestions that the ambulance may have in fact been real were dispelled when the wrestlers started removing parts (like the bonnet and the siren) and use them as weapons. Eventually, they got up top, and Cena AAed Ryback through the roof (I hope for his sake that wasn't legit) to retain the title. Watching all the ambulance parts being used to inflict damage was fun, but it was a bit too light-hearted and it lacked the gravitas that a big title match really needs. But then I expect nothing less from John Cena. This was the weakest stage of the match, but the overall package was entertaining and capped off an excellent show. Rating: ***1/4
Glossary
Face - Good guy
Heel - Bad guy
Smark - Hardcore fan, who knows the inner workings of the business (how a match is put together, for example), and who is more likely to cheer a heel over a face, for example if the heel is a better in-ring worker, or has a more entertaining character.
Alignment - Whether a wrestler is face or heel
No comments:
Post a Comment