WrestleMania took place yesterday on 4/02/2017 in Orlando Florida. It was the 33rd edition of WrestleMania, and it will be forever known as Undertaker’s last wrestling match ever.
Neville (C) def. Austin Aries – WWE Cruiserweight Championship
This match was main card worthy. Good match with lots of good action and great heel work by Neville, who is doing the best work of his career. The entire division had a slow start, but Neville is making the title relevant and Aries is a quality babyface foil for him. I hope to see more from these two. Hopefully, they can get more time and be treated more important in the future. *** 1/4.
Mojo Rawley Wins The Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal
WWE got its ESPN highlight moment in this match as Rob Gronkowski helped his friend, Mojo Rawley, win the match. It was a fun and fine moment, although I feel as though they could have accomplished it without wasting the match on Mojo Rawley, someone who hasn’t been doing much of anything as of late. Although, it is not as if this match means much of anything anyways. N/R.
Dean Ambrose (C) defeated Baron Corbin – Intercontinental Championship
Dean Ambrose got his offense in and so did Baron Corbin. That is all you can say about this match. It was heatless, didn’t build anywhere, and nothing impressive happened. It was too paint-by-numbers and too basic. Not the star-in-the-making performance Baron Corbin needed, and after Miz did great work elevating the IC and making it prestigious again, Dean Ambrose has made the title as meaningless as it was before Miz’s title reigns with it. * 1/2
AJ Styles defeated Shane McMahon
It was ridiculous at times seeing Shane McMahon going toe-to-toe with AJ Styles and pulling out complex submission holds as if he is a jiu-jitsu expert. I never want to see these two wrestle each other again (or see Shane McMahon wrestle again, for that matter), but in spite of a sluggish start, this match really picked up and became a dramatic “to and fro” match. Kudos to both for making it feel like Shane McMahon had a legitimate chance of winning. McMahon pulled out some impressive moves, including a shooting star press, and AJ Styles was excellent as usual, carrying Shane McMahon to arguably his best match of his career. They felt at home by playing their to strengths and characters when Shane McMahon was his body around and putting his body on the line, but at the end of the day, AJ Styles was too athletic and cunning to lose. *** 1/2
Kevin Owens defeated Chris Jericho (C) – United States Championship
This is the type of WWE booking that has made this era so frustrating. The feud, leading up to the match, was ultra-personal and visceral, but then the match ended up being such a commonplace WWE match. It would have helped if this had a gimmick attached to it, though it did not need it. All it needed to do was get over the fact that these two despise each other. It did not accomplish that, though, as it felt like a match someone could see on your average Raw episode. ** 1/2
Bayley (C) defeated Sasha Banks, Charlotte, and Nia Jax – RAW Women’s Championship
This was rushed and slipshod. It never clicked or established much of anything. It just felt like they were wrestling for the sake of wrestling sans a plan or objective. The whole story was muddled before this match even happened, as it should have been Bayley proving she can defeat the champion Charlotte without any help. This should have been a defining moment in Bayley’s career, but despite winning, it was a fairly unremarkable win for Bayley that will soon be forgotten. **
The Hardy Boyz defeated Enzo and Cass, Cesaro and Sheamus and Gallows and Anderson (C) – RAW Tag Team Championship
Obviously, the match was overshadowed by the epic return of the Hardy Boyz, which was one of the few actual”WrestleMania moments” in quite some time. However, this match was still really good. Everyone played their roles well and the wall-to-wall action made it hard for anyone to get bored watching this. Even at his age, Jeff Hardy is still willing to kill himself to create memorable moments. And, it was totally the right decision to put the titles on the Hardyz, as this show needed a feel good moment after two heels winning and a lackluster women’s match. *** 3/4
John Cena and Nikki Bella defeated The Miz and Maryse
Not much to say about this one. It was as standard as a mixed-tag can get, a total waste of both the Miz and Cena, if you ask me, who deserved much more than this. The Miz might be the hottest act in WWE right now, though, and it’s amazing that he has remained this over in spite of being reduced to such a throwaway match like this. The dude deserves a WWE title run this year. I’m happy the crowd was mostly respectable about the proposal, no matter how ill-fitting, foreseeable, and manufactured it was. *
Seth Rollins defeated Triple H
This match may depend on your mileage. The reviews for it have been polarizing. Overall, I enjoyed it. I thought it was structured and put together well. Seth Rollins sold well and Triple H did an effective job working over the knee and always going back to the knee whenever Rollins would gather some momentum. The crowd wasn’t responsive as much as they should have been, perhaps because of this being a 25-minute match and them starting to become burnt out after a long day, and the match did not have any truly chaotic moments where the match begins to flurry out of control. However, this was paced well, and mapped-out well and also told a good story and had a satisfying conclusion where Rollins battled and overcame his wounded knee to give both HHH and Stephanie McMahon the comeuppance they deserved. *** 1/2
Randy Orton defeated Bray Wyatt (C) – WWE Championship
This match needed to be a wacky gimmick match of some sort to fit the context of the feud and to break up the conventional feel of this show. However, they had a basic WWE match and not a very good one either. This had no flow, no heat, no drama, and no story. It never built anywhere and felt like they were doing moves for the sake of doing moves with no purpose behind them. The weird theatrics didn’t fit into this match at all, derailing the little flow this match had, to begin with. This is a front-runner for worst match of the year, and it proves that Bray Wyatt has no business being anywhere near the top of a card. Randy Orton’s heart did not look like it was into this, either, and sadly I don’t believe this feud is over yet. AJ Styles vs. Randy Orton would’ve been a better and more suitable WWE title match, for sure. DUD
Brock Lesnar defeated Goldberg (C) – Universal Championship
This was too short to be a MOTYC or anything, but that does not mean it was not super fun, energic, lively, and heated. This got the crowd right back into the show, as they were super hot for this. This was no technical masterpiece, but it was like watching Sami Sosa and Barry Bonds both trying to out-duel each other and doing so by swinging for the fences. It broke up the WWE match formula by having urgency, feeling like it could end at any time, and two wrestlers who feel like they actually want to win the match from the get-go. Surely, WWE has too many people kicking out of finishers today, but with these two, it completely makes sense, due to the way they are booked and portrayed. ***
Naomi defeated Alexa Bliss (C), Becky Lynch, Carmella, Natayla, and Mickie James – Smackdown Women’s Championship
This was just a buffer match and that was its only purpose, so there’s not much else to say about it. *
Roman Reigns defeated The Undertaker
Plodding, mechanical, labored, and, at many times, desultory. Undertaker had nothing left in the tank to make this a WrestleMania main event worthy match, and even though he was retiring after the match, this did not deserve to be the main event of WrestleMania. There was nothing on the line, and the crowd’s reaction towards this match symbolized that, as they were apathetic towards the entire thing. They were trying to tell a story at the end, but it didn’t come off as great as they hoped it would and left people confused. The story wasn’t carefully considered and planned; that, or the execution wasn’t good enough Either way, I was apathetic by what I saw and so were the fans. It was a nice send off for Undertaker at the end, although I’m sure he wishes he had more left in the tank and went out in a better fashion. This WrestleMania ended exactly like last year’s: a lackluster match and WWE forcing Roman Reigns down people’s throats so far that they wanted to vomit. *
Overall: One bad thing about the WWE Network is that WWE can have shows run as long as they want. Somehow, WWE thinks people want to endure 7-hour shows, but what they are doing is just burning people out and overexposing their product. If they cut out the fat on this show, it would have been much better. Instead, it was another WWE event that stumbled to the finish line and dragged a bunch of tired watchers with them.
It doesn’t help that the majority of WWE matches are so homogenous and formulaic at this point, replacing in-ring characterizations, psychology, creativeness, and storytelling for back-and-forth action (which allows everyone to get their stuff in). It is truly hard to have a great match in WWE these days thanks to this homogenized formula with every match playing out virtually the same. People like AJ Styles can have great matches thanks to his otherworldly athletic ability and so can people like Brock Lesnar who are allowed to have matches that feel different. But the template has made so many matches and wrestlers so indistinguishable, and it is ten folds worse when a show is 7 hours long.
This show was pretty fun and entertaining for a while, but it hit a wall after the Seth Rollins and Triple H match. I will give this show a generous “thumbs in the middle” – thanks to the over-delivering McMahon/Styles match, a very good ladder match, an epic Hardyz return, a very good HHH/Rollins match, and a very fun, albeit short, Lesnar/Goldberg match – which means, the show better than I expected it to be, though something I never want to watch again.
This is just what WWE is now, so we just have to accept it for what it is…I guess.
