Wrestlemania XXX Review (or “Nope, That’s Not The Name Of A Porn Film”)

This time last year I sat here and wrote a scathing review of Wrestlemania XXIX.

I don’t often do wrestling reviews, but I was so disillusioned by the poor quality on show that I felt I had to.

Here’s how I summed it up…

As a viewer since 1991, I must admit my interest in the WWE product is at an all time low, and I saw absolutely nothing atWrestleMania 29 to make me feel positive about the weeks and months ahead.

A Great Way To Start The Show

That’s how bad it was.

A lot has happened in the last year though, and since the massive fan backlash at the Royal Rumble, there have been signs of an improving product.

And that leads us to the present and WWE’s latest offering, Wrestlemania XXX (which isn’t a porn film).

WWE Wrestlemania XXX Review

I’ll go through it on a match by match (or segment by segment) basis.

The Hall of Fame Ceremony: Ok, a quick detour first of all to the previous night’s Hall of Fame Ceremony. I can only echo what others have said. In order, in terms of speeches, Lita was incredibly dull, Jake Roberts was just breathtakingly

amazing, Mr T was unintentionally hysterical, Kane’s speech for Paul Bearer was enjoyable, Scott Hall was short, effective and to the point, Carlito was the only amusing bit in an otherwise super-dull Carlos Colon speech, and The Ultimate Warrior was fantastic. I especially loved the way Warrior thanked the people who really helped him in his career rather than the usual suspects. Overall, a great watch.

The Tag Title Fatal Fourway: A decent way to kick things off in the pre-show. The right team won, but it’s a bit odd that Cesaro was the one to take the fall. The split was a sign of things to come,

The Opening Segment: Hogan, Austin and The Rock all in the ring together exchanging barbs to start off with? That’s about as good as it gets. Well, I’d have preferred it if Bret Hart was in there instead of The Rock, giving it the whole “Uh…well…uh…you know…uh….Hogan is a piece of shit” stuff, but hey, you can’t have everything. The Rock doesn’t do much for me, but Austin and his “What” stuff is still gold, and the way they got round Hogan accidentally calling it the Silverdome twice was genius. A great start.

Triple H vs Daniel Bryan: As you would expect, it was a solid match, although Triple H’s entrance was a bit stupid. Stephanie McMahon is a very effective character these days too.

The Shield vs Kane & The New Age Outlaws: Well, it was over with quickly, but then why wouldn’t The Shield make short work of a trio of semi retired older men?

Aaaaaaaaaah!!!!

The Battle Royal: I’m disappointed that were weren’t one or two legends in there, and I don’t really get why they didn’t just announce that the likes of Tyson Kidd and Yoshi Tatsu (can you believe he won the battle royal at Wrestlemania XXVI?!) would be in it in the pre-match graphic, but it was a nice little battle royal. The Kofi Kingston spot was impressive, although he seems to be employed purely for high spots in matches like this. The right man won though in Cesaro, and the sight – and reaction from the crowd – of seeing him slam the Big Show over the top rope was superb.

John Cena vs Bray Wyatt: While I enjoyed it, I feel the match went on just a little bit too long, and I also think the wrong man won. While Wyatt shouldn’t have won cleanly, he still should have emerged the victor. Losing doesn’t do much to help him on the face of it, while Cena losing would have done nothing to his status.

Brock Lesnar vs the Undertaker: Wow. Who the hell saw that one coming? In the pre-determined world of pro-wrestling, very little can shock a viewer as long-term as me. Sure, things can pleasantly surprise me (like the Cesaro victory in the Battle Royal) but not *shock*. This shocked me. And it shocked everyone.

Now sure, all the logic of pro-wrestling said Lesnar should win considering the Undertaker dominated him in the run up to the show, but this is The Undertaker at Wrestlemania. He doesn’t lose. And even though it was quite obvious he was old, run down, not a patch on the guy he was even two years ago and – to be blunt – looked like an old drag queen, and even though he was up against a beast like Brock Lesnar, wrestling logic would not allow anyone to believe the Undertaker wasn’t taking the win.

So I thought that was fantastic – even though the rest of the match was shit – and I loved the crowd reaction. Grown men were crying and some left in disgust, but that’s what wrestling can just so very occasionally do to you. Superb. I would say The Undertaker should now retire, and from listening to what the commentators were saying, I think that might be what happens.

The Divas Match: An absolute mess. To be fair, I’m sure it would be difficult for any male wrestlers to create a good match in similar circumstances, but it still came across as amateur hour. As a fan of Total Divas, my mum wanted to watch this match, but even she could only say “That looked so fake” as all the Divas queued up on the outside for that Bellas plancha spot. The crapness ended when Naomi managed to botch tapping out. *groan*.

Daniel Bryan vs Randy Orton vs Batista: So Daniel Bryan got his happy ending after all. It was a decent match and included a gruesome lookingPowerbomb/RKO spot through a table, and a nice cameo from Triple H & Stephanie, but I

Undertaker lost? This guy can’t believe it either

think most people were still just shocked at Undertaker losing. To give the wrestlers credit, they *almost* had me believing that Batista would win on those two near falls.

Wrestlemania XXX: Final Thoughts

Apart from the Divas, this was a rock solid Wrestlemania for the first time in a long time. Indeed, it’s easily one of the best they’ve ever done.

Without doubt the polar opposite of the abysmal Wrestlemania XXIX.

Storylines were concluded, new superstars were made and there was nostalgia aplenty, but the big story was the Undertaker’s loss.

I just don’t think anyone saw it coming.

Tonight’s Raw should be very interesting.

 

Wrestlemania XXIX Review (or “Nothing New Or Interesting Happened”)

So I’ve been out of action for almost a fortnight now having been struck down with food poisoning, but I’m certainly feeling more sprightly this week.

It’s definitely the morning after the night before for me though as I only recently managed to get to bed after staying up with friends for a yearly tradition; watching Wrestlemania.

Now I know instantly some regular readers will balk at this review because of the subject matter, but hey, don’t like it, don’t read it 😉

Anyway, going in to watching WrestleMania XXIX (or as the Sky Planner incorrectly named it, WrestleMania XXVIIII…idiots) I can’t say I was particularly energised about it.

WrestleMania is supposed to be the Season Finale for WWE. The centrepiece show to wrap up a year of storylines and matches where all the performers bring their A Game to the table.

It’s supposed to have all the big matches, the top stars and a marketability that the other eleven pay per view events don’t have.

It’s supposed to be special.

But this has been a poor year for WWE. With a lack of freshness and a mind numbing repetitiveness at the top of the card (The Rock and John Cena have been trading barbs for over two years now) I just didn’t feel there was too much to be excited or hopeful about.

What could change? Would John Cena finally develop his character? Would The Undertaker lose his streak? Would Triple H lose to Brock Lesnar and retire? Would anything of note happen?

Let’s see.

WrestleMania XXIX (29) Review – The Atmosphere

The first thing to note about WrestleMania 29 was the crowd.

It’s great that WWE can still pull in north of 80,000 people for a show, and no doubt they’ll have made a load of money from it, but open air stadiums do absolutely nothing to enhance the product on-screen.

For the people in attendance, I’m sure the atmosphere was electric, but the sound of their chants, cheers and boos are lost to the viewer at home because of the acoustics of it. Rather than being picked up by the microphones, the majority of the sound made by the people in the stadium float away into the sky.

As a result, WrestleMania seemed flat for most of the show. As a viewer, I picked up no enthusiasm from the crowd, and so it hampered my enjoyment.

Great crowds make an average wrestling event seem better than it is, but dead crowds make good ones feel pedestrian.

The Matches

As for the quality of what we were served up, I can’t say I was hugely impressed.

Six Man Tag: Not a patch on either of the Shield’s other two PPV matches. Nothing exciting happened, and the finish was as expected. There was no need for the Big Show to turn on his partners at the end and all it has done is set up another boring feud for him on Smackdown vs Orton. Oh joy.

Mark Henry vs Ryback: I didn’t think this was that bad. Loved that Mark Henry won as it keeps him strong. The post match stuff also allowed Ryback to save face. No complaints.

Team Hell No vs Ziggler/Langston: A basic TV match, the kind of which you see every week on Raw. It was nice to see the crowd still love Daniel Bryan though.

Fandango vs Jericho: The right man won but in the wrong way. Why have Jericho kick out of the new man’s finisher? And the finishing sequence seemed a little bit botched to me.

del Rio vs Swagger: I honestly couldn’t care about either man. Not surprised by the winner.

Undertaker vs CM Punk: People are talking up this match like it’s a classic, and while it was good, to me it didn’t hold a candle to the Undertaker’s last four WrestleMania matches. Sorry, but everyone knew he was going to win, and unlike the Triple H and Shawn Michaels matches, Punk did nothing to make me – as a viewer – feel that that could change.

Lesnar vs Triple H: Maybe it’s because I was drifting in and out of sleep during this match, but I thought it was good. Unlike almost every other match, I didn’t know who was going to win, so it turned out to be quite exciting. But it was far from amazing.

The Main Event

The biggest talking point for me though was the Main Event.

The phrase “Shower of shite” would be apt to describe the match between The Rock and John Cena.

For a start, we didn’t need the amount of video packages shown throughout the event leading up to it. That time – as well as the time wasted on that P Diddy Concert – could have been spent on backstage skits or keeping the Brodus Clay match on the card.

The Cena/Rock feud has been tedious. It was new, fresh and exciting two years ago, but that ship has long since sailed. I honestly don’t think WWE has its finger on the pulse with this at all.

Going into the match, I didn’t care who won, and I’m not sure many in the crowd did either. Sure, nobody wanted Cena to win, but the Rock has been so pitiful as WWE Champion that I’m guessing very few people were actively hoping for him to go over either.

What would have been good – from a logical storyline development perspective – would have been if an increasingly desperate Cena turned to underhand tactics to put the Champion away. This would have made sense and could have set up months of interesting television on the interminably long 3 hour Monday Night Raws.

Sadly it wasn’t to be.

What transpired was that Cena won clean and the two of them shook hands and became friends. Oh pass the sick bucket. They telegraphed that ending two years ago. Where’s the excitement? Where’s the interest levels?

It wasn’t just that though; the match itself was absolutely rotten.

Rest holds in less than five minutes and not even the slightest bit of psychology.

People who don’t like wrestling will point to its pre-determined nature as being a bad thing, but what it can do is allow the wrestlers to tell a story in the ring. When a wrestling match hits the right notes, it can be superb.

This didn’t, and this wasn’t.

Basically the last 10-15 minutes involved Rock and Cena trying to hit their finisher on the other. No psychology, no reasoning, no nothing. Any wrestler could do that. And what was worse was that the two of them were clearly talking each other through it as they went along.

It was amateur.

Most of the blame must rest on the shoulders of The Rock. He hasn’t had one halfway decent match since returning, and seems unable to perform at the standard that people seem to expect from him.

But Cena was poor as well.

Really, it was just a huge disappointment that sent fans home unhappy.

Wrestlemania 29 Review – Final Thoughts

Nothing stood out in a good way about WrestleMania 29.

Perhaps the biggest problem with it is the hype associated with it.

WrestleMania is supposed to be special, but with what sounded like a dead crowd, and no matches standing out as classics, it just felt like the same old, same old.

And that’s the problem WWE has right now; there’s nothing new, fresh or interesting about the product. John Cena will go back to being the top dog, and it doesn’t seem like he has any opponents waiting in the wings to challenge him,

I can’t see anything interesting on the horizon.

As a viewer since 1991, I must admit by interest in the WWE product is at an all time low, and I saw absolutely nothing at WrestleMania 29 to make me feel positive about the weeks and months ahead.

It wasn’t a bad show, it was just unremarkable, and that’s not what WWE are marketing.

Much like the way their voices disappeared into the New Jersey night sky, I can’t help but feel WWE has a struggle on their hands to keeping hold of their loyal fan-base unless something changes soon.

Get Involved In The Debate

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Stuart’s Week In Entertainment April 23 – 29 (One Tree Hill, Prison Break, Willy Wonka, William & Kate and Lesnar vs Cena)

One Tree Hill – The World’s Most Amazing Town (With Backing Music)

One Tree Hill started off as a drama about a school basketball team. Now we’re onto Season Nine of the show and…well…let’s just say it’s not about that anymore. Instead, it’s now a show about the most successful group of school friends that have ever lived. In an era where jobs and opportunities for school leavers are hard to come by, the twenty-something Tree Hill gang consists of…

• A world-famous fashion designer
• A world-famous actress-come-singer
• A man who used to own a car dealership before murdering his own brother and going to prison, emerging as a nationally acclaimed TV Evangelist before falling upon hard times and opening a Greasy Spoon which he subsequently burned down in a bid to ingratiate himself back in with his family
• A famous singer who runs a record company
• A former famous singer married to…
• A former NBA star who now owns and runs his own successful Sports Agency along with his friend who is going out with…
• A famous photographer
• A couple who are the Tree Hill equivalent to Richard & Judy (or for my American readers, Regis & Kathy Lee)
• And the world’s most sickening brilliant child.

Even Antwon ‘Skills’ Taylor went from being the token bum in the show to become an acclaimed Hollywood Sports Choreographer.

Previous inhabitants of Tree Hill also include a famous author, the owner of a record company who represented the most famous singer in the world (who was herself a Tree Hill resident)

Yes, this man has an ideal face for TV presenting...

It’s become one of these shows where I just have to see it through. The first few series were actually very good, but beyond that it’s been mindless TV aimed more at the E4 crowd than me – and yet I still watch it out of a misguided sense of loyalty and mild curiosity.

There’s so much wrong with the show that it’d take too long to explain, but let’s focus on a few issues.

1. Every single scene has music playing in the background. Why? What’s the point?
2. Nothing bad ever happens to the main characters. Actually, let me rephrase that; everything bad happens to them, from kidnap, attempted rape, attempted murder, being involved in car accidents on bridges (specifically bridges I have to stress, they never happen anywhere else) and encounters with everyone from Evil Nannies to Psychotic Women Who Look Exactly Like Clay’s Dead Wife. But nothing lasting ever happens. It’s the worst case of Reset Switch Writing seen outside of cartoons.
3. Dan Scott supposedly had about 3 weeks to live 5 seasons ago. I *think* they just stopped mentioning that.
4. There’s no way a guy with Mouth’s face would front a TV show. He was clearly hired for this show because he looked weird and that’s fine, but I don’t think chat shows generally hire people who look like him.
5. The way they all have such wonderful jobs and all love life so much that they all scoff at the guy who is ‘only’ a bar manager. What sort of message to send out is that?
6. Jamie Scott (the horrible little boy who hasn’t grown an inch upwards since he was 5 years old and now could be a genuine midget) is the sort of child who – if you knew him and this was the 1970s – you’d slap about the head until he’d learnt some humility. In this, they just go ‘Awww, isn’t Jamie wonderful’. No! He’s not! He’s a smart arse little prick who you actively hope gets killed off.

I’m around half way into the final season now and there are such amazing storylines as ‘Nathan Scott is Missing’ (otherwise known as ‘The Guy Who Plays Nathan Scott Isn’t Contracted To Appear In Every Episode’) and ‘Mouth is fat’. Hurrah!

Never mind…it’ll be over soon.

Prison Break: Link The Sink – Man About Town In Panama

I’m finally away to finish Season Three of Prison Break – a.k.a. Link the Sink: Man About Town In Panama. Thank God.

I like Prison Break – it’s a terrific show – but Season Three is utterly pointless. It’s just filler.

They could have ended the show nicely at the end of the second season with everything brought to its natural conclusion, but no. Instead half the characters end up back in prison. But not any old Prison – oh no dear reader – a Panamanian Prison that is so unruly that the prison guards retreated leaving the inmates to fend for themselves. And of course, Michael Schofield has to break out of it.

While this is going on, Michael’s brother – Link the Sink – generally wanders around Panama with his odd shaped head, having drinks with assorted people in hotel bars and cafes trying to organise the escape from the outside. It’s all very boring and time filling stuff which is rendered utterly pointless in the first episode of the fourth and final season (which incidentally, I think it brilliant, despite what most people say).

The only thing that is good about the Panama season is the Haunted Acting by William Fichtner as Mahone. First class stuff.

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory

Everyone has seen this film so it doesn’t need its own stand-alone review. I saw about half an hour of the original film the other day and a few things occurred to me.

• Charlie Bucket is a selfish little bastard. On the one hand he has this massive sense of entitlement surrounding the golden tickets. You know the type of people who think they deserve more in life because they ‘weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth’? He’s the classic example. There are a very small number of golden tickets, and for whatever reason he believes for sure that he’ll get one. And moreover he believes that he should get one. He’s like one of these idiots who goes onto the X Factor and thinks that they have a personal relationship with Simon Cowell because they’ve spent years watching him on TV and therefore think that he’ll give them a recording contact on the strength of that. Well sorry, it doesn’t work like that.
• And then when he does get the Golden Ticket he actually uses it. Now clearly, despite his reasonable-for-the-period clothes, he’s very much part of an underclass that I assumed died out in the Victorian era. He lives in a house with four people who share a bed that they
  

  This is a Social Worker. He needs sent to sort out Charlie Bucket, post-haste.

  never leave. The smell alone must be horrendous. They can’t afford basic food, they had to save up to buy a chocolate bar and there doesn’t appear to be a social worker in sight.

• What his mother should have made him do was sell that ticket to emerge from the squalor in which they all live. But no, they just let him use it for a day-trip to a chocolate factory. Utterly irresponsible.
• Verruca Salt reminds me of an irritating little boy who sits near me when I go to the football. He sits there in his pointlessly expensive child clothes, squealing in a high-pitched voice at the ref whenever things don’t go our way, while his bleached blond mother sits idly by and lets him attempt to ruin my enjoyment of the game. Argh!
• Wonka is a marketing genius, quite clearly. I don’t think people give him the credit he deserves. But there’s no doubt his factory should be shut down. None at all.

William & Kate – The Movie

No, I didn’t watch this the whole way through – I only saw it for about 10 minutes the other day.

All I can say is ‘Wow’.

I didn’t think you got cameras of that low rent nature anymore but apparently you do. It looks like a medium budget Friday-Night-On-Channel 5 Soft Porn film from the mid 1990s. Dreadful.

It was also blatantly filmed in America. Now I live about 10 miles away from St. Andrews, and I can honestly tell you that St. Andrews looks absolutely nothing like that. But then, I don’t think attention to detail was of paramount importance to the producers of this film, what-with Kate breaking into an American accent (apparently the girl – who has starred in such classics as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – is British, but she’s clearly lived in the US long enough for her accent to have changed a bit), William wearing a US Air-force uniform rather than a Royal Air-force one, and St. Andrews University being called ‘St. Andrews College’.

Absolutely horrendous viewing, and that was only from the limited amount I saw.

But at least the guy doing an impression of Prince Charles made me laugh.

WWE Extreme Rules

I’ve been very critical of things so far this week, so I thought I would discuss something I actually enjoyed – WWE’s Extreme Rules event.

Containing stellar matches like Daniel Bryan vs Sheamus and Chris Jericho vs CM Punk, this event was worth the hard-earned cash of any wrestling fan.

Best of all though was the match between John Cena & Brock Lesnar.

Sometimes wrestling fails to capture your imagination. I would hazard a guess that 95% of the people reading this review will be thinking of me in a derisory manner for enjoying wrestling, but this match was brilliant. Everyone knows that Lesnar- as a former UFC World

Brock Lesnar - Video Game Boss

Champion – is a genuinely hard bloke; someone not to be fucked with.

And so his match with Cena had an edge to it. With him elbowing Cena in the head and drawing blood within the first few seconds, it set the tone for a match that more resembled a Boss Fight in a video game or the end of an action movie. Brilliant stuff, and a match so good it actually surpassed the Triple H vs Undertaker match from Wrestlemania.

Well done to all concerned in putting that spectacle together.