Author: Colette Arrand

Movie Review: John Wick (2014)

John Wick is an anachronism, a stylish action thriller whose fight choreography chops are legit to the point that the usual gamut of camera and editing tricks used to create motion where none exists are largely put away. There’s a good bit of background mythology, too, an underworld of contract killers who operate on respect and gold coins, who have pasts they are either proud of or are trying to leave behind. Were it released ten years ago, and had Lionsgate a better sense of how to market a film where a man in a suit kills dozens of men wearing suits, it’s not hard to imagine the dorm rooms I frequented in college having a John Wick poster up on the wall, right next to The Boondock Saints, the Baba Yaga of this film standing shoulder to shoulder with the MacManus brothers in the bro canon.

I feel a little bad writing that, because I actually enjoyed John Wick a good deal. In 2014, it seems like films leaning heavily upon the aesthetic of early Woo and Tarantino efforts have finally managed to quell the rampaging hormones that soured stylish killers to the point of queasiness. Here, Keanu Reeves is the titular hero, a former hitman of legendary proportion who up and walked away from the game one day. He got married. His wife died. Knowing her husband would be distraught and purposeless without her, she arranged for a puppy to be delivered to John. Before long, a crew of Russian gangsters break into John’s house, looking to steal a car he had earlier refused to sell. They knock John out. They kill the dog. They leave it there for John to find when he comes to. None of them know John Wick’s reputation. They will, soon enough.

The revenge plot here is what it is, and it ends as it must. What’s more interesting about John Wick is its underworld, and how Reeves navigates it the way a ghost would, his surroundings both familiar and strange. After stopping an assassination attempt singlehandedly, Wick decamps to The Continental, a full-service hotel/bar/hospital/spa/brothel for men and women of his former profession. If you’ve got a gold coin on you, anything is a phone call away. The Continental has rules—no noise, no violence, no business of any kind. It’s perfect for Wick’s needs, as he has an account and has drawn the ire of Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist), whose son (Alfie Allen) killed Wick’s dog. Tarasov once worked with Wick, and he knows that it is hopeless to plead mercy on his son’s behalf. So he puts out a bounty for two-million dollars, four if anybody is willing to break The Continental’s strict rules. Wick, when he isn’t perforating Tarasov’s faceless heavies, is hunted by the young, ruthless Perkins (Adrianne Palicki), and protected by Marcus (Willem Dafoe), who always seems to be on the right roof with a sniper rifle. Wick knows all of these people, and others who populate the world-within-a-world that is John Wick‘s playground. It’s a vague, barely sketched out premise, and the fact that it works is a result of a smartly chosen cast meeting ideas that are interesting enough, if not thought about for too long.

But the mythological aspects of John Wick are what directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch are hoping to build a cult around. The selling point of this film are its action sequences and its way with gunplay. Stahelski and Leitch were Reeves’ stunt doubles in the past, and the clarity of the carnage throughout is quite satisfying. Reeves moves through a rave or his mansion, tracking and killing every man that stands between him and his ultimate goal, and the camera right along, content with whatever rust there might be on its aging hitman’s bones. There’s a seeming effortlessness to it all, a cool beyond the overly-cool blues that the film is washed in, and it makes Wick a more engaging figure than all of Nyqvist’s growling about his boogeyman, back from retirement. As a veteran of countless Schwarzenegger and Stallone movies about hulking men trying to put some wife-related misery or death out of their minds, my ability to engage with gun-toting men in mourning has withered, and my capacity to appreciate the puddle deep philosophies of those genre pictures that take themselves too seriously is at its end. On some future rainy afternoon, though, it’ll be tough to refuse the proposition of John Wick on cable, with limited commercial interruption. That’s a kind of success, too. Not a poster on a dorm room wall, but something.

John Wick. With Keanu Reeves (John Wick), Michael Nyqvist (Viggo Tarasov), Adrianne Palicki (Perkins), Ian McShane (Winston), John Leguizamo (Aurelio), and Willem Dafoe (Marcus). Directed by Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, from a screenplay by Derek Kolstad.

February 22, 2015
Wrestling Review: Lucha Underground (2/18/15)
It’s been awhile since I checked on Lucha Underground in this space, but that train has kept moving just fine. Their finely crafted blend of plot, action, and background has served them well and continues to as they take on new roster members like Texano, former AAA Mega Champion, and Alberto el Patrón, the man formerly known as Alberto Del Rio. They’re well past the stage now where they have to keep explaining what makes their brand different (the luchadores, the rules, the fact that men can fight women) and just keep pressing on. It’s really impressive, seeing what they do with an hour of television every week, and given the storylines that’ve been simmering since Prince Puma won the Lucha Underground Championship, I wouldn’t at all be opposed to something like an NXT Takeover special out of them, to see how Lucha Underground functions as a live show where all the stories converge and resolve.

That won’t be happening anytime soon, though, so it’s best to appreciate what we have. Matt Striker and Vampiro don’t have much time to talk, as the first match is part of a bookended main event, Chavo Guerrero, Jr. finally facing Mil Muertes over Guerrero’s betrayal of the man of 1,000 deaths some months ago. It’s fortunate for Guerrero that it took so long for this match to happen, as Muertes is without Catrina, his second, who has in her possession a stone that is capable of controlling the big luchador in a way that’s similar to The Undertaker’s urn. Where Muertes was a big, bruising destroyer a few months ago, he’s more vulnerable now, and the crafty, youngest Guerrero is able to pick his spots throughout. He spends the majority of the contest working on Muertes’ leg, which is smart little guy vs. big guy strategy, but Muertes, distracted or not, is still a hulk. Something I like about him (about Lucha Underground in particular, as well as NXT), is that something as simple as a punch is still treated with respect. The referee doesn’t reprimand Muertes for using them, but each one he lands on Guerrero is a bomb.

The story of this match is less about what Chavo Guerrero did to Mil Muertes (who once threatened that all of Mexico would be coming for him, a prophecy that is thus far untrue) than it is about Muertes’ seeming aimlessness without Catrina. So she comes out to the ring, carrying Muertes’ stone. He doesn’t notice her for awhile, powering Chavo around the ring, but when he does he can’t look away. This lets Chavo go to his pal, the steel chair, and nail Muertes with it, causing a disqualification. This does not, however, faze Muertes, who now easily dominates his opponent, hitting him with a flatliner on the chair. He wants Catrina to get into the ring to lick Chavo, which was once their post-match ritual (instead of calling it the “kiss of death,” they’ve decided to stick with the much more literal “lick”), but she refuses. This makes Mil Muertes angry enough to grab Catrina by the hair and bring her into the ring, where it looks like he is going to hit her with the flatliner until Fenix rescues her. His reward is a kiss from Catrina. Look at how jazzed he is for that kiss:

That is one hype dude. Matt Striker speculates that “where the tongue goes, the loyalty goes.” And, yeah, that’s the way it looks. Good broadcast journalism, Matt Striker.

Lucha Underground does a fair amount of its storytelling via these backstage vignettes that are filmed in hilariously “grimy” television sets. The Temple itself is a set, but they do a fair enough job of rotating new audience members in and out that the studio setting never feels too distracting, even if nobody in the crowd cares about faces or heels, rudos or technicos. Some of the backstage promos, usually ones featuring Dario Cueto, are pretty good. Some, like the ones featuring a sneaky woman sneaking around the Temple in clothes she lifted from The Matrix, are what they are. Angela Fong, who has yet to be given her official Lucha Underground name, gets two segments tonight. Previously, she has been seen hanging out in the audience. She picks locks. She kicks doors in. She sees a cage rattling and is excited because she swore, as a girl, to kill whatever’s inside. Then she gets bagged by an unseen assailant. Lucha Underground is trying something new here, filming wrestling angles like they’re scenes from a film or a television show. It worked well, I thought, in introducing Prince Puma, but here I’m not so sure. What does shooting from the point-of-view of whatever’s in that cage accomplish, beyond preventing us from seeing it? And what do you do with someone like Fong, who is not a wrestler and is not really an actor and who is being asked to deliver some stilted, Saturday afternoon movie dialog? When the monster debuts, will Striker and Vampiro know about it from watching the show on television later, or is this one of those closed universes that exists entirely outside that plausable realm? And, if that’s the case, then how does Matt Striker know about New Japan Pro Wresting’s Wrestle Kingdom 9 if he’s been locked away in the universe of the Temple? I’m overthinking this, especially since this story has gone nowhere so far, but I think that pondering the implications of a somewhat limited, but open, universe is valuable four months into a show like Lucha Underground, which has recently taken to calling itself a league. What’s the wrestling/film ratio, and how much can the show handle away from the ring before it becomes too much? I’d like to know.

The other backstage segment takes place in Dario Cueto’s office. Evil authority figures are overdone in wrestling, but Cueto is a pretty good one, a man who appears to not care about anything but making money, but who is into some pretty heinous stuff. Case in point, his meeting with The Crew, who now wear matching basketball jerseys with that distinction so that those unfamiliar with the three can tell Cortez Castro, Bael, and Mr. Cisco apart. Cueto is a fan of what they did to Big Ryck a few weeks back, putting out his eye with a cigar. He loved it so much that he’s going to tell his grandchildren about it, when he has grandchildren. Evil stuff. He wants to see The Crew in more main event spots, but feels that they need to prove that blinding Ryck wasn’t a fluke. They’re in the main event tonight, against a trio of “freaks”: Sexy Star, Mascarita Sagrada, and Pimpinela Escarlata. The Temple is open for anybody, but he’s not happy that a woman, a mini, and an exótico are so over with the crowd, and he wants The Crew to take them out. He makes a no-disqualification trios match between those two for later.

In the ring, Ivelisse lectures her boyfriend Son of Havoc for being a loser and figures that they’d be better of if she fought his battles. She’s not wrong, considering Son of Havoc’s abysmal win/loss/draw record. Ivelisse’s opponent is Angélico, a fellow from South Africa who previously defeated Son of Havoc. I’m all for intergender wrestling, and Ivelisse is an impressive woman whose work I’m not as familiar with as I’d like to be, but this kind of intergender contest, where the man makes like he just can’t hit a woman though she’s hitting him pretty goddamn hard, is more problematic to me than those where the man just destroys the woman. Underdog narratives are one thing, but Angélico’s strategy is to work Ivelisse into a series of dance moves, attempting to kiss her. It’s supposed to be cute, but whatever. Once Ivelisse hits him with a springboard rana, that should get Angélico out of the blocks. It almost does, as he pops Ivelisse into the air with a flapjack, but he plays the role of chivalrous man until Son of Havoc kicks him in the jaw. This sends him stumbling head over heels over a recovering Ivelisse, who takes the win from there with a roll-up. Lucha Underground has constantly touted itself as believing in the equality of men and women in the ring, but the action in its intergender matches thus far has shown that it only goes so far. If Angélico’s refusal to engage with Ivelisse resulted in him getting his head kicked in and a clean victory for her, so much the better. But Ivelisse, despite getting 90% of the offense in this match, can’t win without the help of a dude. It’s the same pattern that’s been established in most of Sexy Star’s matches, the difference being that Ivelisse is a rudo. Equality becoming more of a fact than a talking point would be a nice step forward in the coming weeks.

Last week, Alberto el Patrón arrived in The Temple, but his debut was spoiled by Texano, who whipped the stunned AAA champion with his bullrope. Before his match against Super Fly, we’re given more of Texano’s story via a pre-taped interview by Vampiro, where he says that he is here to crush Alberto el Patrón and take back the championship he feels was stolen from him. It’s a good interview, showing off Texano’s intensity. Also, they splice in a good amount of footage from Texano’s time in AAA, where he is shown running roughshod over a number of luchadores, and from his feud against Patron. Most of Lucha Underground’s hispanic viewers are already AAA fans and are familiar with his work and the ongoing issue he has with Patrón, but the interview is very helpful to a stupid American like me, who knows Patrón from his “exile” in the United States and knows of AAA, but doesn’t keep up with it. It’s very well produced, as is much of Lucha Underground’s show. His match against Super Fly is short and to the point, showing off Texano’s size, speed, and agility. He’s an impressive athlete, and he absorbs some solid shots from Super Fly. In the end, though, Super Fly eats Texano’s double neckbreaker combination, whatever momentum he once had now all but lost. This brings out Patrón, who is the best in the world at ripping off a suit jacket and looking real angry. They fight, and it is Patrón who comes out on top, grabbing Texano’s bullrope and whipping his rival with it. Referees and security guards separate the two and Texano takes a powder, so Patrón whips the referees instead. It’s simple, effective wrestling storytelling, and I’m looking forward to seeing Alberto el Patrón wrestle mean against a guy who might be able to match him.

In the office, Dario Cueto takes a meeting with Cage, a big ‘ol white dude who debuted not too long ago, smashing Prince Puma and his championship. He demands to be named the Lucha Underground champion, but Cueto, as impressed as he is with Cage, says that it isn’t that easy. While he’s certainly beaten up Puma in the past, his last match against him ended in defeat. He’ll need to actually beat Puma to prove that he deserves a shot. That’s fine with Cage, so long as Cueto makes a belt that isn’t Aztec garbage. Chavo Guerrero busts into the office next and says that he doesn’t need Lucha Underground anymore; he just wants to go home and be with his family. Cueto wishes him the best in all his future endeavors, which is a line that gets Chavo angry because that’s what WWE puts in all of their press releases when they fire guys, and they have fired Chavo in the past. It’s a good, subtle dig since it’s dickish regardless of the viewer’s knowing that. Cueto tells Chavo that the doors of his Temple are always open, then figures that the gods won’t be happy about what happened to his strap made of leather and Aztec gold. Look at how much they’re able to do there, in that short segment!

The main event is, as promised, a no disqualification match. Interestingly, despite El Ray being a network that plays grindhouse films on Friday nights, the level of violence in no disqualification matches has thus far been below what is presented on WWE’s fairly sanitized product. This match, pitting The Crew against Sexy Star, Mascarita Sagrada, and Pimpinela Escarlata, is really no different, though it works as a good showcase for both the diversity of Mexican lucha libre and the budding star potential of Sexy Star. The Crew work to take out each of their opponents one after the other. The first is Pimpi, who makes the mistake of kissing Cortez Castro. Castro takes Pimpinela Escarlata out with a kendo stick. Mascarita Sagrada does better, but when he dives out onto The Crew, he is quickly swarmed, powerbombed into the ring apron, curbstomped on a chair, and left for dead. That leaves Sexy Star. She finds herself in the ring alone with Mr. Cisco, who takes the opportunity to check her out. Matt Striker uses this as an opportunity to say that he’s not as sexist and misogynistic as Cisco, which is a) debatable and b) not exactly a stirring defense in the face of fan complaint.

Sexy Star is able to outsmart The Crew for much of the match, making it seem like the three made a mistake by leaving her in last. Star is a really compelling character, one of the best in wrestling at the moment. Though she’s a rudo in Mexico, Lucha Underground recognized from the start the value of an equality fighter. Mascarita and Pimpi are great, but they’re more like representatives from very specific niches in lucha libre. Sexy Star, upon her debut, made it clear that wrestling was her life, the thing that saved her when she had no hope, and the thing she continues to fight for. While the results of her matches haven’t exactly propped her up as well as they should, everything up until someone comes to her rescue is usually quite good. Here’s another case in point. After The Crew take out her teammates, Sexy Star takes each one of them out until it’s a one one one match. Bael takes a tornado DDT to the floor. Cortez Castro goes down to a fisherman’s neckbreaker. That leaves Mr. Cisco, the leader of The Crew, and while he’s initially able to stop a super rana, he takes too long with his powerbomb counter and is eventually taken up and over. Sexy Star gets a two count for this and The Crew reassemble, ready to put the evil on her, but that is Big Ryck’s cue to reenter The Temple. Cisco and Castro exit the ring, leaving Bael as easy pickings for Sexy Star, who wins with a roll-up. Again, that pattern. It’s noticeable because I’m no stranger to intergender wrestling, and because of how common this finish seems to be in Lucha Underground. They get away with it because Star was fighting alone and it makes sense for an exhausted Crew to run from a gigantic man whose eye they put out with a cigar, but if the only guy who can lose clean to a woman is El Mariachi Loco, a man whose character is that he quit his dishwashing gig around the corner from The Temple and found a lucha mask, then what does that really say for that aspect of the product?

Results:
1. Mil Muertes def. Chavo Guerrero, Jr. via disqualification. GRADE: B-
2. Ivelisse (w/Son of Havoc) def. Angélico via pinfall. GRADE: C
3. Texano def. Super Fly via pinfall. GRADE: C+
4. Sexy Star, Pimpinela Escarlata, and Mascarita Sagrada def. The Crew (Mr. Cisco, Cortez Castro, and Bael) via pinfall. GRADE: B
February 19, 2015
Wrestling Review: WWE NXT (2/18/15)
After the excellence that was NXT Takeover: Rival, there’s nothing wrong with a show like this, a cooldown effort that exists largely to set the next month or two of storylines up. NXT General Manager William Regal (long may he reign) sets the tone early. Anybody concerned that Sami Zayn was cheated out of the NXT Championship at Rival should know that titles can change hands due to referee stoppage. Kevin Owens is well and truly the man, and tonight is a new era. To launch it, Kevin Owens will fight against the runner up in the NXT Championship #1 Contenders Tournament, Adrian Neville. Neville, still Zayn’s friend, is not happy with the (perfectly legal) way in which Owens won the belt, and is out for revenge. That’s a good match, and one that works with Regal’s declaration of a new era. Neville was the NXT Champion for a long time, from the origin of the WWE Network until Zayn was able to finally take it away. That’s an era. And Owens, whose brutality is unlike anything seen on NXT, represents a step up. Owens says as much when he tells the NXT Universe that Sami Zayn is in the past, and that the future is Finn Bálor. After stating once again that he fights for a better future for his family (what a mean dude!), he tells Bálor that he is ready whenever the #1 contender has a date in mind.

The first representative of NXT’s new era is…Rhyno, a guy who was last seen on WWE television in 2005, on the ECW throwback pay-per-view One Night Stand. Rhyno hasn’t entirely disappeared from wrestling, as his physique shows, but between stints on TNA’s Impact Wrestling, Ring of Honor, and other independent promotions, the shock of his return, unlike the shock of a novelty return during the Royal Rumble, is real. The crowd loses their collective minds when the word RHYNO pops up on the ‘Tron, and the dude acquits himself so well that he is spared the ignominy of a “YOU’VE STILL GOT IT” chant. Beyond a few poorly chosen tattoos, Rhyno looks really good squashing Elias Samson with a belly-to-belly suplex and a Gore, an the fact that he’s going to be around for awhile is quite interesting. The announcers put over how NXT is frequently considered the future of the WWE, but that it might also serve as a proving ground for old warhorses with something left. As Finn Bálor talks about his future opportunity against Kevin Owens, he is interrupted by Rhyno, and I guess that’s a match we’re going to get out of this. I’m all for it. This is subtly a really smart use of an old veteran, as beyond the nostalgia pop he’ll get from the crowd, Rhyno was actually one of the best mid-card performers the WWE had during what may have been their in-ring peak from 2001 to 2003. NXT continues to signal that the future of the main WWE product lies within the boundaries of a wrestling ring, so having somebody who excelled at that working with the next generation can only be a benefit.

The other indicator of a “new era” was the debut of Solomon Crowe, which has been hinted at through various small scale “hackings” of NXT’s promotional videos. He came out of nowhere to attack CJ Parker, the environmentalist character who takes a good beating and is frequently upset with how he is left off of NXT shows. He threatened to hijack NXT, to take over Takeover as it were, and went about stringing caution tape from post to post. Crowe blindsided him, put some of his aggro power moves on poor Parker, then allowed us to get back to our regularly scheduled programming. It was… not the best NXT debut I’ve ever seen? Crowe’s character is that he’s a hacker, and most of the pictures I’ve seen of him since he left the indies had him in a suit, toting around an iPad with a sticker on it. I’m glad that’s not how he looked here (he wore a scuzzy leather and pyramid-stud jacket and caveman singlet), but either Crowe is doing his hacking from a tanning bed and has gone mad from exposure, or somebody else is uploading his goofy graphics for him. Who knows if it will work, is what I’m saying. In front of this crowd? Probably. Beating up CJ Parker tells us absolutely nothing, though, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Squash matches are the order of the evening, as challengers to championships need to be established, and new champions need to establish their reign. The Vaudevillains, once a formidable tag team, are easy pickings for Enzo Amore and Colin Cassady, who are something of a Jersey scumbag upgrade of the New Age Outlaws. Enzo is one of NXT’s more talented smack-talkers (in fact, he once claimed that his Jedi name was “Smacktalker Skywalker”) and Colin Cassady is able backup (though the audience does not like their lady third, Carmella, presumably because attractive women hanging around Enzo and Big Cass doesn’t fit the slashfic headcanon the straight male dudes booing her have authored), but man will it be interesting to see them in a match that’s longer than three minutes. Also, while I’m hardly a fan, it’s worth mentioning that the Vaudevillains have worked pretty hard at establishing their tag team schtick, and that it’s something of a surprise to see them get crushed so handily. Less surprising is the fate of Ol’ Blue Pants, known on the indies as Leva Bates, the surprisingly popular jobber to the stars who pops up so regularly that she has a TitanTron, a theme song (sung by Big Cass), and an entrance. Leva is hardly the most talented woman working the independents, but she’s able enough when required to take a beating, which she does. Sasha takes her out quickly with her knee drop in the corner and the Banks Statement (which is not a good name for anything), then tells the NXT Universe that everybody, especially the women she beat for her title, need to respect her. Based on video testimony from Bayley and Becky Lynch, it appears that they do.

Oh, video testimony. At NXT Takeover: Rival, Sami Zayn was knocked out and declared unable to continue the match. It was a good, surprising finish to a great match, with the speculation being that Zayn would be “suffering from a concussion” while Owens made NXT his own. But the lead WWE Physician assures us that everything was fine with Sami after the match, just that things during the match made it seem like he was unable to defend himself. He’s off on the Abu Dhabi tour and will come back fine. That… hmm. I hate to review a wrestling show as if I’m counterbooking it, but saying that Zayn got powerbombed so hard that he pretty much went on vacation is much less effective than saying that he needs time to recover from nearly being beaten to death by a man he once thought of as his best friend. When Zayn comes back and is really angry about what Owens did (which was win a match legally), the question on my mind is going to be why he didn’t skip the Abu Dhabi tour to get him some revenge.

Were it not for the fact that Adrian Neville has reason to be mad at Kevin Owens, the whole revenge angle to this week’s main event would have been shot, too. But Neville had the evil put on him by Kevin Owens two months ago in a match that ended in a draw, and a victory over the newly crowned champion would put him in line for a title shot. In one of his best interviews to date, Neville said that he felt more like a hunter this time around than the hunted, and he puts that old cliché to work as he jumps Owens before the bell. The champion is able to get on track briefly, catching Neville with an early gutbuster, but after a second attempt at the move leads to him getting spiked on his head with a DDT, it’s all Adrian Neville. Owens, try as he might, is unable to put some distance between himself and his opponent, unable to find the time to recover. Neville is on top of his game tonight, too. He’s quick with his strikes. He’s reckless with his high-flying moves to the outside, particularly with a 450 splash from the ring apron to the floor. His ability to lift Owens up and dump him on his head is quite impressive, as he not only scores a quick German suplex with the momentum of the ropes, but manages to deadlift his much heavier opponent from the canvas. Owens is able to get back into the match by throwing his weight at Neville, but for a long time here it looks like he won’t be denied. Neville counters Owens’ corner cannonball into a superkick and a reverse rana, but the ensuing two count and the time it takes to drag the champion into the corner for the Red Arrow allows Owens to roll out of the way. Neville tries to charge in after he recovers from the landing, but Owens catches him with the pop-up powerbomb, and in two weeks Kevin Owens has secured victories over two men who, more than any other, have come to define NXT.

In its pre-taped, one hour iteration, NXT is a very good wrestling show. It has a number of stories to tell and is able to do so quickly and nimbly. But, like this week’s Raw, appreciating the way the pieces move on the board is not the same thing as enjoying the show. Rhyno’s return is worth watching in full, as is the main event. But unless squash matches or the characters in them are your thing, there is a lot about regular, weekly NXT that is inessential. Not that it isn’t good, because it very frequently is. But when a show ends with Kevin Owens thrusting his title in the air over a fallen ex-champion, I find myself wanting NXT to do that more than I want it to bum around with Blue Pants.

Results
1. Rhyno def. Elias Samson via pinfall. GRADE: C+
2. Enzo Amore & Colin Cassady (w/Carmella) def. The Vaudevillains (Simon Gotch & Aiden English) via pinfall. GRADE: C
3. Sasha Banks def. Ol’ Blue Pants via submission. GRADE: C
4. Kevin Owens def. Adrian Neville via pinfall. GRADE: B+
February 19, 2015
Movie Review: Jupiter Ascending (2015)

Calling Jupiter Ascending an original movie is perhaps disingenuous. While it is among those increasingly rare science fiction blockbusters that weren’t adapted from comic books, novels, video games, or television shows, it is, like Pacific Rim before it, a hulking labor of nostalgia for an incredibly specific genre of film, the technicolor fantasia of the space opera. A dazzling array of humans, aliens, and spaceships pass before the eye, each of them unique and carrying loads of often unexplained baggage, but there’s hardly one that doesn’t have a corollary in Star Wars, Star Trek, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or something decidedly stranger, more off-beat. Andy and Lana Wachowski have always worn their influences on their sleeve, but here, with the gross domestic product of several small nations at their disposal, they are bearing their hearts, both of them glittering machinations assembled from the detritus of what used to be called nerd culture and what is now just culture. By making a film so decadent and doomed to failure, they seem to have laid claim to that tiny parcel of the collective imagination that is still yet unconquered by the spandex-clad horde.

None of this is to say that Jupiter Ascending is any good. In fact, most of it is very bad. An array of beautiful images crudely hacked apart and stitched back together in the editing bay, to describe any aspect of the plot here as presented is to sound like one is making assumptions of a very long film after catching the last five minutes on television. Here goes nothing. Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is an undocumented Russian immigrant unsatisfied with her life cleaning toilets in Chicago. One day she is selling her eggs to a fertility clinic, which is surely a first in an action film. The next, she finds out that, through accident of birth, she is the exact genetic duplicate of the matriarch of clan Abrasax and the rightful owner of the planet Earth. This places Jupiter in the middle a family war between a hedonistic prince (Douglas Booth), an eternally young princess (Tuppence Middleton), and their ruthless industrialist of a brother (Eddie Redmayne), her only sure protection in the galaxy (which she will span in its vastness) being a soldier-turned-mercenary human/wolf/insect hybrid (Channing Tatum) first seen smelling her name on a sheet of paper at the clinic. There is a team of bounty hunters. There are little grey men. There are gigantic lizard men. There is the crew of the ship. There are robots and bureaucrats and the individual members of Jupiter’s family. All of them matter. Some are, it seems, audience surrogates, just as confused as we are about the world beyond our world that dances among the stars to an ancient song that can only be heard by those with access to its score.

Luckily, the Wachowskis are keen to overshare. Large stretches of Jupiter Ascending exist just to fill in the details, coming so hard and heavy that even Jupiter, with her fate and the fate of the world on her shoulders, breaks down and says she doesn’t care about any of it. The other characters know so much and Jupiter so little that she frequently feels like a character without agency, falling for obvious ploys and needing constant rescue from Tatum’s Caine Wise, who has this neat trick where he is rescued from every conceivable deathtrap by the magic of coincidence and given all the credit. This is something of a disappointment, as Jupiter Ascending is, at times, nearly a Marxist, feminist manifesto shrouded by the glitter and doom of a summer blockbuster. Though doing so, I realize, is futile, I keep imagining Jupiter Ascending getting a summer release in a year that wasn’t overburdened with light, spectacle-driven sci-fi, having the billion-dollar success that was envisioned when the project was greenlit. Hundreds of thousands of men watch a woman struggle with the decision to sell her eggs, are enraged for her when her cousin negotiates a large cut of the profits. The working class grow angry with the film’s end boss, his speaking pattern belabored by a state of agonizing, near-constant orgasm as he lectures Jupiter about the need to convert humans into capital. A laugh is had as Jupiter negotiates the bowels of galactic bureaucracy with an over-taxed droid. A moment of silence is shared as a bottle of human goop—the liquid that allows the intergalactic ruling class their millennia-spanning lives—falls to the ground and is shattered.

But I’ve mentioned a hoped for billion-dollar success, which spoils even my utopian ideal for the film. The larger engine at work throughout Jupiter Ascending is its naked desire for a sequel, the further adventures of Jupiter Jones in space or on Earth or wherever the focus group found itself most pleased. While my brain keeps twisting small moments in Jupiter Ascending into larger academic points (the CGI reconstruction of Chicago, just razed by a CGI spacechase, as a commentary on the vapid nature of such sequences, for example), the Wachowskis bumble about like Tobias Fünke, Yes, Anding themselves to the point of insanity. Jupiter is rescued from little grey men by a disgraced bounty hunter. Yes, and they fall in love. Yes, and their romance is complicated by issues of class. Yes, and there’s a marriage where one of the evil princes tries to marry an exact genetic replica of his mother. Yes, and that is spoiled by the bounty hunter, who was initially hired by the prince under the pretense that he would be reinstated to the military. Yes, and members of the military have wings! Yes, and, without his wings, the bounty hunter has these boots, these anti-gravity heelies that make it look like he’s tearing ass through the mall, even when his life is in danger. Yes, and, uhh, something about bees; an entire house covered in a honeycomb! Yes, and… uhh, wait, bees? Did you say bees? Yes! And, I dunno, maybe Jupiter’s scummy cousin buys a flatscreen TV?

On and on and on, until the perfunctory action sequence brings us to the required Disney princess ending, which is some weird combination of The Secret and that old, classist pablum that one should be happy with what one has. Here, that means waking up at four in the morning to clean the toilets of the wealthy despite owning the deed to an entire planet, being okay with one’s place in a machine so large that even a Jupiter-sized refinery represents but one small cog within it. Recently, I saw a headline in my Google news feed that asked if Marvel could “save” the Wachowskis. Jupiter Ascending suggests not, as, despite its trappings, this is essentially their Marvel film, disguising the same mostly white, mostly male exceptionalism coded within the MCU with the same safe message that no, really, everybody can be special, the princess or the soldier (never both, and never something else). That’s a marketable idea, but not one the Wachowskis or their film seem to believe in. No, the heart of Jupiter Ascending, beating faintly under layer after layer of bloat, belongs to Terry Gilliam, sniggering maliciously as he affixes a rubber stamp to the deed that awards Jupiter Jones ownership of Earth. It’s a fine dream Jupiter has, of liberating her and her family. How easy, Gilliam’s appearance suggests, for that dream to become madness.

Jupiter Ascending. With Mila Kunis (Jupiter Jones), Channing Tatum (Caine Wise), Sean Bean (Stinger Apini), Eddie Redmayne (Balem Abrasax), Douglas Booth (Titus Abrasax), Tuppence Middleton (Kalique Middleton), and Terry Gilliam (Seal and Signet Minister). Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski, from a screenplay by the Wachowskis.

February 18, 2015
Wrestling Review: WWE Raw (2/16/15)
Quietly, the WWE has done a very good job of building up to Fastlane, which they’re billing as a “new pay-per-view concept” though, really, it’s just a regular pay-per-view without the usual February Elimination Chamber main event. The lack of a Chamber match, I think, is the reason why Fastlane is so compelling. The WWE calendar is littered with pay-per-views that are branded by one kind of match or another that the matches themselves, no matter how violent or how good, feel more inevitable than special. Without the crutch of putting six guys in a goofy chain-and-plexiglass rig with the absent WWE Championship on the line, instead what we have is the supposed fast lane on the road to WrestleMania. Considering how slow that road has felt thus far, having a date on the calendar where everything will supposedly get back in gear feels like a blessing. “Quietly” in this case also means “glacially,” especially compared to the stretch between last year’s Royal Rumble and WrestleMania, when nearly every Raw had a standout match or segment. Raw will need to pick up the pace sooner rather than later, but, as the last show before a pay-per-view that looks, on paper, like the strongest card since SummerSlam, the WWE does a good enough job of getting everybody in place.

That includes Rusev, who gets trucked by John Cena in the opening segment. This is not the first time a foreign monster has charged the 15-time WWE Champion with losing a step before Cena Rises Above Hate and proves him wrong. I doubt it will be the last. Since the beginning, it seemed like the endgame for Rusev was going to be a loss to John Cena, who, quite honestly, is going through the motions at the start of Raw. Every John Cena promo from 2007 forward is thrown in the blender. Cena loves the WWE. He loves when fans cheer him. He loves when fans boo him. He hates that there is a monster out there who isn’t from America and who can’t be beaten, and he promises to destroy him. This brings out Rusev and Lana, who are, really, a politicized make-over of the old Armando Estrada/Umaga pairing from 2008, an act that has risen above cartoon parody to become one of the most enjoyable aspects of a show that is frequently hard to enjoy. Lana in particular continues to evolve, relying less and less on the merits of Vladimir Putin and the Raw audience’s hatred of being told to shut up (by a lady who ain’t from here to boot!) and more on the merits of her freakish charge, who I also enjoy on the microphone. Rusev is a blunt object used to smash the opposition, a warhammer who only knows how to kill. John Cena’s gambit is that bringing Rusev down relies on taking the fight to him, which he does by charging up the ramp and hurling the burly Bulgarian into a panel of LED lights. Beyond some shoddy camerawork (really, why would you zoom in and out on bodies in motion?), the physicality of Cena vs. Rusev was quite satisfying. Cena proved his point about his strategy, but wrestling matches don’t work like street fights. Whether or not his plan will work when a referee calls for the bell is the story now, and it’s a good one. Rusev’s mystique isn’t compromised unless he’s pinned or he taps out to the STF. Only an idiot would pull the trigger on that at Fastlane.

The rest of Fastlane‘s undercard was built solidly here, as well, with the exception of the upcoming match between Paige and Nikki Bella. That should be a good match (Nikki Bella is easily the most improved wrestler on the main roster over the past year), but its plot is stuck in the muck and mire of the past ten years of the Diva’s division. It was actually somewhat brilliant when the Bella Twins attacked Paige and spraytanned her, as Paige had been clinging to the frankly stupid notion that simply not looking like a model made her better than all the other Divas. But now we’re in the usual Bella Twin holding pattern where they’re “pranking” (read: assaulting or stealing from) Paige in a variety of ways designed to brag that they look better than her. This week, they steal Paige’s clothes, which forces her to wrestle a match against Summer Rae while dressed in a Rosebud’s clothes. Considering that Paige kills Summer Rae handily, it hardly matters. Women have also factored into the Tag Team Championship storyline between The Usos and Tyson Kidd and Cesaro, as a blown double date between Kidd and Jimmy Uso and their respective wives Natalya and Naomi (sample line: “I’m here trying to respect this dinner”) led to a husband and wife mixed tag team match. The mainstream format of such matches is really dated, but Kidd’s unwillingness to wrestle Uso leads to three good minutes between Natalya and Naomi. Naomi, as is standard in non-title Divas division matches, wins with a roll up, allowing The Usos to celebrate that they got one over on their rivals while continuing to build on the will-they-or-won’t-they saga that is the relationship between Kidd and Natalya. Right now, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if Kidd left Nattie and got an apartment uptown with his buddy Cesaro, but I’m probably just authoring mental slash-fiction. Probably. The tag team division has been a long-running quagmire, but the Usos vs. Kidd and Cesaro match looks enticing, and the Prime Time Players reunited when Titus O’Neil stormed to the ring to help his returning buddy Darren Young escape a whooping at the hands of The Ascension. With the Miz/Mizdow team slowly breaking up, The New Day entrenched in the wasteland that is their racist gimmick, and tonight’s official dissolution of the Rhodes Brothers/Stardust and Goldust, a full-time return of the Prime Time Players, who always seemed on the verge of making some noise in the division, is a good thing.

Speaking of Stardust and Goldust, this Raw, like most, was built around promos. There was John Cena’s opening promo, Triple H’s Ric Flair-assisted promo about a confrontation (read: promo) with Sting at Fastlane, and the promise of Dusty Rhodes addressing the problems between his sons (not to mention the usual Seth Rollins interview). Only Dusty didn’t speak much and, of all the interviews, tonight, the one that most stole the show was Stardust’s declaration that Cody Rhodes was dead and never coming back. Dusty Rhodes’ are shoes no man can fill, but Stardust stood there, painted purple and silver and wearing a rubber suit, and delivered fire right in his father’s face. Stardust has, to this point, felt like a needless, pandering rip-off of Goldust, which was unfortunate given their role in the early iteration of the Authority storyline, but on Raw Stardust was given a purpose and a mission. It’s obviously impossible to separate the character from the Rhodes lineage, but it’s good heel motivation coming out of a brother/brother tag team, and this all should culminate in the Rhodes vs. Rhodes match that Goldust has been rather open about wanting to retire on.

Dusty looked (and is) old, but still acquits himself rather well. That’s less true of his lifetime rival Ric Flair, who surprised Triple H mid-speech to remind him that Sting, ancient old man or not, is still Sting and needs to be respected. Flair sounded drunk, but getting drunk and talking about his glory days is pretty much his job now, so he did well enough that Triple H shoving him on his ass felt sad because The Game was disrespecting a legend he openly admires, not because Flair’s condition continues to darken his legacy. Fallout from Sting’s debut at Survivor Series continues to be the theme heading into Fastlane, as Dolph Ziggler and Seth Rollins seem to be moving into a singles program. Rollins’ promo, unnecessary though it was, signaled that he is being shifted away from the WWE Championship for the time being to focus on the Zigglers, Rybacks, and Rowans of the card. Ziggler continues to be an unconvincing babyface on the microphone, (I’m not interested in white meat, I guess) but an incredible one in the ring. The match between Rollins and Ziggler was good. Not up to the pace they established at Survivor Series, but a good teaser for what the two should be able to do without distraction. They’ll wrestle on SmackDown! in this week’s Raw rematch, though another contest at Fastlane (and perhaps another at WrestleMania) isn’t out of the question.

Beyond Rollins/Ziggler and the main event between Big Show and Daniel Bryan, most of the wrestling on Raw this week as an afterthought. Even a singles match between Dean Ambrose and Luke Harper, while solid, existed more to set-up a later contest than to tell its own story. There were plenty of good spots, but Harper is wandering aimlessly at the moment, and WWE doesn’t do a very good job of protecting big dudes who aren’t in an active storyline. Harper lost clean to Ambrose to establish Ambrose’s credentials against current Intercontinental Champion Bad News Barrett, who beat Damien Mizdow in a match that nudged forward the issue between Mizdow and The Miz. Barrett was fantastic when Ambrose ziptied him to the ringpost and forced him to sign the contract, screaming for a knife to cut himself free and how it wasn’t his signature on the sheet and that the contract wasn’t legal. Had they cut bait on a weird skit where Ambrose “auditioned for Weekend Update,” announcing that he’d make Barrett sign the contract, everything on this front would have been great. Barrett is an effective heel, and, well, if Ambrose is going to be a goofy dude whose popularity the writing team doesn’t understand or know how to harness, he’s best when his goofiness is channeled through a bit of menace, rather than a bad suit. The Intercontinental Championship is always on the verge of meaning something. What matters more than Barrett vs. Ambrose at Fastlane is whether or not the issue continues to build, or if the title reverts to its usual miserable pattern, where the champion loses every non-title match until he is required to defend the title.

The confrontation that will set up Sting vs. Triple H at WrestleMania is an important part of Fastlane. Bray Wyatt’s continued promos that are (vaguely) about The Undertaker (this week he hammered some nails into a coffin) continue to be important. Those are two of the marquee matches at WrestleMania. They are happening. There is no turning back. Less certain is the fate of the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, currently held by Brock Lesnar. He’ll be there, defending, but his opponent is yet to be decided. Roman Reigns earned a shot by virtue of winning the Royal Rumble. Daniel Bryan feels that he deserves one because he was stripped of the championship in 2014 without having lost it and, as he points out, made only one fewer defense of the championship. Reigns wrestled Kane and Bryan wrestled Big Show, but the matches and results were secondary to the simmering issue between the two men, which threatens to boil over into something personal in the main event of Fastlane. After an interview where Reigns questioned the manhood of Bryan for going about a championship match by asking for one instead of earning it, Bryan came to ringside for Reigns match and participated on commentary, where he did a very good job of making clear how slighted he felt by Reigns’ assessment of the situation. He thought there was mutual respect between the two, but there clearly wasn’t. When Reigns had an advantage over Kane, Bryan would stand and lead the Orlando crowd in a YES! chant, which succeeded in distracting his man. Reigns won the match, but not in his usual dominant fashion, and Bryan would later say that, if he wants to beat him, Reigns had better get used to the crowd being in Daniel Bryan’s pocket. During the main event match between Big Show and Bryan, Reigns sat at ringside and watched (he didn’t join the commentary team, for good reason). Reigns took to the crowd, signing autographs and giving away t-shirts, and this caused Daniel Bryan no end of distraction. An exchange near the announce table led Big Show to spear Reigns, who would recover and hit Show with the Superman Punch with Daniel Bryan perched on the top rope for a missile dropkick. With the match over, Bryan would instead hit Reigns with the dropkick, sparking a brawl that closed the show.

This sequence was fantastic, a sprint around the ring and through the crowd that ended in a pull-apart with Reigns bleeding from the mouth and Bryan seething. Initially it looked as though they were going to do with Roman Reigns what they did with Batista last year, turning the hand-chosen WrestleMania main event guy into a heel due to the overwhelming popularity of Daniel Bryan, but this year is much more vague than last. Batista was universally despised from the moment it was clear that Daniel Bryan was not in the Royal Rumble, but Reigns plays pretty well in all but the hottest towns in wrestling. And where Batista had little reason to respect Bryan, Reigns has some respect for the former champion, not only for his in-ring accomplishments and what history they had together when The Shield clashed with Team Hell No, but for his resilience in the face of a career ending injury. But both men want to fight Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania, and it doesn’t look like there will be an opening for a third man in the main event, so that respect had to give way towards animosity with so much on the line. Daniel Bryan is a master at his craft, so the reemergence of his pre-rise mean streak has been subtle and brilliant. The wrinkle that they’ve added to Reigns’ story, that he’s trying to accomplish something not even the most legendary member of his family could achieve, is the most compelling angle Reigns has had since The Shield folded, and has managed to find some interesting space here, too (the t-shirts he was throwing to the crowd were Uso shirts, after all). What initially seemed like a capitulation on the part of WWE in the face of post-Royal Rumble fan revolt has turned into their best story since the SummerSlam domination of John Cena. The match at Fastlane will be telling in Reigns’ ability to become what the WWE so obviously wants him to be, but for now, the table is set. Sunday night will be an interesting one for a number of reasons, none moreso than this. For the WWE to pull itself out of the rut it has so clearly been stuck in since September, Fastlane is going to need to be that rare February pay-per-view that’s more about wrestling than WrestleMania. For once, the uncertainty surrounding a pay-per-view event feels like a good omen.

Results
1. Dean Ambrose def. Luke Harper via pinfall. GRADE: B-
2. The New Day (Kofi Kingston & Xavier Woods w/Big E) def. Goldust and Stardust via pinfall. GRADE: C+
3. Roman Reigns def. Kane via count out. GRADE: C
4. Paige def. Summer Rae via pinfall. GRADE: C-
5. Dolph Zigger def. Seth Rollins via disqualification when J&J Security interfered. GRADE: B
6. Darren Young & Local Talent vs. The Ascension never officially started. GRADE: N/A
7. Bad News Barrett def. Damien Mizdow (w/The Miz) via pinfall. GRADE: C
8. Jimmy Uso & Naomi (w/Jey Uso) def. Tyson Kidd & Natalya (w/Cesaro) via pinfall. GRADE: C+
9. The Big Show def. Daniel Bryan via disqualification when Roman Reigns interfered. GRADE: B-
February 17, 2015
Wrestling Review: NXT Takeover: Rival (2/12/2015)
When Roman Reigns won the 2015 Royal Rumble and #CancelWWENetwork trended worldwide on Twitter, there seemed to be this hitch in the sentiment, a slight hesitation: There would be a new live NXT special, and it would feature Sami Zayn and Kevin Owens reprising a feud that, for many, ranks as the best in the history of the independents. More than CM Punk’s tumultuous rise and fall, and more than Daniel Bryan’s ascendence to the top of the card, the story of Sami Zayn vs. Kevin Owens is the most unexpected development in recent WWE history—that a skinnyfat (to steal a line) French Canadian who used to work under a mask and a normalfat French Canadian wrestling in basketball shorts and a tanktop would be deemed “the future of this business” by no less a scion than Triple H, and after the pair had been deemed worthless by former Ring of Honor booker Jim Cornette for being too indie for the most indie of indie feds, is truly incomprehensible. Those who were hoping for this generation’s Guerrero/Benoit WrestleMania XX moment from Punk and Bryan, some verification that the “wrestling” in World Wrestling Entertainment is of ultimate importance, were putting too much weight on what is ultimately an overblown pop-culture novelty that places more emphasis on Mania than anything else. Whatever book that gets written about Triple H’s “book that never ends” begins here, in the only environ that’s more constructed than WrestleMania, The NXT Arena at Full Sail University. If this is the future, then the WWE is in awfully good shape.

Beyond Lucha Underground, there is no televised wrestling show that is more competently, completely booked than NXT. NXT Takeover: Rival featured five matches, and all five of them, regardless of their quality, had a reason for being on that show. Hideo Itami and Tyler Breeze, who opened the show, were in something of a battle of runner-ups in the NXT Championship #1 Contender’s Tournament. Baron Corbin and Bull Dempsey have been bullying each other for awhile now in an effort to establish themselves as the baddest big man in town. The Lucha Dragons were trying to avenge an upset loss of their NXT Tag Team Championships to the upstart tandem of Team Thick. And then there were the co-main events, a fatal four way for the NXT Women’s Championship and a one-on-one contest between Zayn and Owens for the NXT Title. Both feuds have long, extensive histories behind them, equally impressive in terms of what NXT’s writers are willing to do both with extra-WWE history (Zayn and Owens) and a women’s division whose championship feuds aren’t contested largely on grounds of petty jealousy, body-shaming, or the “bitches be crazy” mode of storytelling that is, depressingly, the one button the team writing Raw and SmackDown! know how to push. On “Stone Cold” Steve Austin’s podcast, Triple H said that writing that third hour of Raw is the most difficult creative task in WWE. While I hardly think that cutting that hour would fix all the problems, the NXT Takeover specials have proven to be a model for the kind of storytelling a compressed timeframe necessitates. With no time for a 30-minute speech to set up the night’s events, we’re given a dramatic recap video that’s as good as anything produced for the main event feuds on the main shows, our hellos from the announce team (Rich Brennan, Corey Graves, and Jason Albert), and head straight for the ring.

The first contest will likely be the least buzzed about in the months that follow, but Hideo Itami vs. Tyler Breeze is proof that the NXT system is working in more ways than one, both in developing “WWE guys” (Breeze) and in working out the kinks of wrestlers who are coming in from different systems (Itami). Hideo Itami was one of the most respected professional wrestlers in Japan, where he competed as KENTA, but his initial transition to the WWE and its in-ring style has been somewhat of a non-starter. His debut was the platform from which Finn Bálor launched himself, and, beyond a few flashes of brilliance, he’s yet to really have a signature match. Of the group including him, Bálor, Adrien Neville, Sami Zayn, and Kevin Owens, Itami faces the hardest transition, both in terms of style and culture. As for Breeze, he was the star of the main event of NXT Takeover: Fatal Four-Way, but saw his position on the card slip as more renowned talent from the independents and Japan made their debuts. He’s a tremendous talent who works his gimmick (“part man/all model” as the theme song goes) so well that it would actually be a shame to see him transition over to Raw, where 15,000 fans and three disinterested announcers wouldn’t give it the time of day. Here in NXT, things like a fuzzy selfie stick and a screaming ladyfan getting too grabby are worthwhile touches to an already masterful piece of characterwork. Itami tries to start out by kicking the pretty out of Breeze in retaliation for an attack backstage, but Breeze maneuvers his way behind the referee and uses that diversion to take advantage early. Avoiding Itami’s kicks is Breeze’s angle here, but he can’t hope to do so as Itami is at least as quick as Prince Pretty, if not quicker. Before long, Itami has Breeze on the mat and lights him up with a scintillating kick to the chest—either Itami is putting extra oomph into them in his first live singles match or he’s figured out how to slap his knee, as is the fashion. Whatever. Some things are still magic to me. The sound of flesh slapping on flesh, for instance. Breeze, meanwhile, does a superhuman job of selling those kicks and Itami’s momentum. His character has also undergone a very subtle change in ring, moving from a psychological need to preserve his looks to a desire to finally clinch the NXT championship. As such, his wrestling is much meaner than it used to be, the way he takes advantage more wily than in the past. Hideo Itami has more experience than Tyler Breeze, but Breeze has more experience in the WWE style, which, in NXT, is paramount. The resulting match isn’t a clash of two styles, but a story of one hugely hyped international prospect finally figuring out the learning curve against a guy who feels like he’s been looked over in favor of shiny new signings. That’s a solid foundation for a wrestling match, and what they build on top of it is really quite impressive.

The rest of the first half is not good. NXT is frequently great, but it is still an extension of WWE’s development program, an effort to get their young workers camera ready while simulating the pressure of a main roster show. Some guys, like Bull Dempsey, are competent enough but just have nothing going for them. Others, like Baron Corbin, have a long way to go before they’re camera-ready, but are there because of their size. Dempsey was formerly the bully of the roster, taking down chumps left and right in “impressive” fashion, but then Baron Corbin hit the scene with his height, his ability to brood, and a fake biker/wolfman aesthetic, and now its his job to beat people in less than a minute. That got Dempsey envious enough to cost Corbin in the #1 Contender’s Tournament after two decisive losses, setting up this no-disqualification match. Corbin is terrible, pretty much all size, so it’s on Dempsey to lead the match. He does a capable job until its Corbin’s turn to take over, blowing a spot so badly that the happy-go-lucky, mostly self-involved NXT Universe actually boo them. Corbin can barely lift Dempsey for his finishing move, The End of Days, which, in addition to being a terrible Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, is also a terrible-looking thing to do in a wrestling ring. Following that is a match for the NXT Tag Team Championships between The Lucha Dragons, who have the worst official tag team name in wrestling, and Buddy Murphy and Wesley Blake, who, having once been called “Team Thick,” have the worst unofficial tag team name in wrestling. Kalisto and Sin Cara, the Dragons, are both capable high fliers, but both men are off tonight, and Murphy and Blake—two ex-cowboys who retired their cowboy hats when they heard about this new dubstep thing everybody seems to like—aren’t able to help them. The two teams keep exchanging moves, reversals, and blown, awkward spots with one another until it’s over. I can’t tell if the two teams were working too fast or if they were trying to work to fast and just couldn’t hit the pace they were looking for, but there was very little to like about this beyond the closing sequence. If there’s one thing that’s consistent across every WWE brand, it’s the irrelevance of the tag team division. Whether or not they’re able to build something around these two teams remains to be seen.

After that, though, this NXT Takeover special is hot fire for about 90 minutes. It never stops. It never lets up. The first contest is simplicity itself, a match to determine who the next challenger for the NXT Championship will be. Finn Bálor and Adrian Neville went through an eight-man single elimination tournament to get here. They also have a history against each other in Japan and bring an extensive knowledge of each other’s game with them to the NXT arena.Kevin Owens weaseled his way into a championship match, but after him there were no clear contenders. Neville had his chance to regain the gold. Bálor, like Owens, is too new to the scene to demand that he has a shot. But the tournament has established that the two are in a different class. Better than Baron Corbin. More “ready” than Hideo Itami. The NXT Championship feels like one of the most important titles in wrestling because of simple, effective storytelling like this, an undercard that is constantly gunning to be the top man on the best wrestling show in North America. On the live specials, Bálor takes it to the next level with his entrance, putting on body paint and Predator dreads and really soaking in the adulation of the crowd. It worked really well in New Japan Pro Wrestling and will probably work really well on WWE pay-per-views, but his special entrance really makes the arena look small, and, in front of the same people who see it every few weeks or so, less special than it should be. I was more into the show Adrian Neville made of putting in his mouthguard, even if mouthguards are, like protective cups, the antithesis of professional wrestling. The two really take their time in building this match up from its entrances to its finish. At first, much is made about how both are wrestling a slower match than anticipated, as both are known for their flying finishing moves, but it’s not so much a “race to the top rope” as it is a test of will an conditioning. Bálor actually hits a double stomp to the back of Neville’s head really early, a killing blow in most matches, but not all plans are fated for success. Once Neville hits one of his big moves (a corkscrew splash from the second turnbuckle, which is unreal), he shows his frustration by taking out his mouthguard and hurling it to the canvas. But that lets Bálor get back into the match with a slingblade clothesline (to the mouth!), which is why you wear your mouthguard. Nice bit of in-match storytelling. The finishing sequence is absolutely breathtaking, with Bálor countering the Red Arrow with knees to the gut, which he transitions into a small package. Bálor follows with his dropkick into the corner, which is being built as the dropkick to end all dropkicks, and crushes Neville with a double stomp to the gut. If this match is indicative of what it means to be in line for a shot at the NXT Championship, then it follows that any match for the NXT Championship should/must be better. In a WWE ring, though, it doesn’t get much better.

The NXT Women’s Championship match was built entirely upon in-WWE history, a fairly complex weaving of characters and storylines that is unlike anything the company has ever done with any permutation of a women’s championship. On Raw and SmackDown!, feuds for the Diva’s Championship, a hideous panoply of rhinestones and butterflies and reproductive organs, feuds are normally based on looks (“Look at Mickie James—she is so fat!” or “I don’t look like a typical diva, so I’m better than all of them!”), romantic ties to men, or the “bitches be crazy” school of thinking that it’s tempting to say that the people in charge of that show, despite the strong game they talk about having strong female role models, don’t see women as individuals worthy of much attention. I remember when the women’s spot at WrestleMania 29 was cut, the argument being “Well, would you have a Bella Twins match at WrestleMania at the expense of seven or eight minutes of John Cena vs. The Rock?” Maybe not, but there’s probably always room for women’s wrestling on a card that features a mini-concert by Puff Daddy. That’s how women are treated on the WWE cards that everybody sees. In NXT, they get this rich tapestry where the Women’s Championship is about on par with the NXT Championship. Charlotte, the daughter of Ric Flair, is the dominant champion of the division. Sasha Banks has been nipping at her heels since the dissolution of their stable, gaining confidence in herself (and her character) with the passage of time. Becky Lynch joined up with Sasha Banks, feeling that she needed a change of attitude in order to be successful, but isn’t the obedient foot soldier Banks demands. Bayley, having come up short in her effort to capture the championship, has realized that success is more important than being friends with people who constantly take advantage of her, and has been more aggressive in chasing her dream without compromising who she is. She’s the dark horse in this match, talking about “having her Sami Zayn moment” where she redeems herself by finally winning the big one, and she has something of a Sami Zayn moment in this match when she slides under the turnbuckles to land a kick on Becky Lynch. Before that, though, there’s a lot of storytelling to get through. Lynch and Banks team up, dividing and conquering Bayley and Charlotte. They eliminate Charlotte from the match for awhile by throwing her into the side of the ring, where one of the dumb LED panels that have no place on a wrestling ring blinks off to signify how brutal the impact was. I’m not a fan of that kind of stuff. Wrestlers are good enough at selling pain to do it without special effects. But it’s a minor thing, because Charlotte gets back into the match without the usual big production of ringside physicians and stretchers and all that.

This is a very good match, full of impressive double and triple team moves that look brutal. Bayley, whose character has always grated on me, was particularly impressive. There was a Fatal Four Way match on an earlier NXT Takeover special where Tyler Breeze, goofy supermodel, surprised a lot of people by being the star of the match. That’s where I was here with Bayley, person who likes to hug everybody. She doesn’t wrestle mean (like Breeze did), but she wrestles like she’s determined to win, less for the fans and more for her. It’s this nice, subtle character arc that should pay off even bigger in a singles match. But the story here is Sasha Banks, who has been blowaway fantastic, and her quest to prove that she is better than Charlotte, who is probably the best product yet produced entirely by the WWE Performance Center. Charlotte is wrestling from behind after getting thrown against the ring, humanizing her somewhat, and the element of chaos added by two other competitors is too much for her. Sasha Banks is never without a plan, zeroing in on Charlotte’s ribs, making it hard for the champion to breathe. When the crossface she has Charlotte in doesn’t work and she finds the champ inching towards the ropes to break the hold, she’s got enough faith in the damage she’s done to transition her submission into a roll-up, which secures the victory. It’s this big, emotional moment for Banks, showing that the seemingly evil “Bo$$” of NXT has a heart, but she largely proved her point, beating the champion and her two top contenders in one fell swoop. She shoos away Charlotte after the former champion hugs her, less interested in a supposed passing of the torch than she is in relishing in her moment. This is the best women’s match on a WWE show since the division was largely imported talent from Japan. It’s also either the best fatal four way match or second best depending on how you feel about the other NXT go at this format, which is usually a boring, convoluted mess. There has always been the potential for a good story here. Finally, away from the bright(er) lights and big(ger) arenas of the WWE’s touring act, they’ve figured out how to tell them.

The main event, too, has a nice story to it, both in the way WWE is telling it (fourteen years of friendship for nothing) and in the reality of the situation, which is that Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn have been inextricably linked throughout their professional lives as partners and as rivals. Even without that past history in the mind, the story leading up to this match made it clear that it was going to be unlike any Sami Zayn match thus far, that all of the fun of his rise was out the window, and that his post as the defender of NXT from the likes of Curtis Axel and Titus O’Neil was all for naught, as Kevin Owens doesn’t care about fun and he doesn’t care about NXT. He’s such a weird, engaging presence as a heel on this program, as he says that he’s been working his entire life to get to this point and that winning the championship means a better life for his wife and children. It’s Sami in the promo videos who sounds like the bad guy, saying that Kevin “changed” when he got married. But in the ring, Owens is a brutalizer, a man whose only desire is to punish whoever is set in front of him, and if it’s a guy who he figures bailed on their plans to make it into WWE together, so much the better. Owens is, in an odd way, being built as the Brock Lesnar of NXT. A cold, relentless throwback to an era that would have laughed at the concept of “sports entertainment.” Here’s a dude who nearly had his nose shoved into his brain in his debut match, who still has that scar, who looks like he wouldn’t mind bleeding some more. He should be set across from Bruiser Brody or Terry Funk or Abdullah the Butcher, but he’s there with Sami Zayn, god help the poor champion, with fourteen years of history and fourteen years of being told that the WWE wouldn’t want a chubby dude in basketball shorts and a tank top.

The announce team compares this match early to the tone of John Cena and Brock Lesnar’s main event at SummerSlam, as it’s all Owens dominating Zayn. But where Lesnar took Cena apart piece by piece, suplex by suplex, there was nothing personal about it. Even with their history, Lesnar was just there to win a title and sit upon his throne of human skulls. Owens takes it to Zayn with strikes. Punches. Kicks. Chops that issue with the concussive force of a shotgun blast. Zayn is the absolute best in the world when it comes to selling, so even Owens’ most basic stuff seems deadly. When he cranks it up, man, it’s like nothing I’ve seen in the WWE in years, even in a Brock Lesnar match. With Lesnar, it’s a matter-of-fact brutality, a neanderthal man overwhelming his opponent through sheer natural ability. Kevin Owens, on the other hand, learned how to be this way, how to turn his girth and his ambition and his spite into weapons. Brock Lesnar is a hateful man. Kevin Owens has hate in his heart. And Sami Zayn isn’t John Cena, who is himself a test-tube freak. Zayn fought and bled and sweat for fourteen years, too, only his experience made him resilient. It taught him to love wrestling and the people who love it. It makes these two perfect foils, Owens as the monstrous bully and Zayn as the heartbroken babyface who refuses to die as a personal point of pride. All Zayn needs is an opening and he can catch Owens with his suplexes and kicks, which are too fast for anybody to stop. Zayn’s offense, to that point, is beautiful. There’s a Rey Mysterio Jr. over-the-referee dive to the outside, a slower, meaner Blue Thunder Bomb, big suplexes. Every time he counters one of Owens’ bombs or kicks out, it feels huge. But he is the victim of circumstance, banging his head on the entrance ramp after catching Owens with a springboard moonsault. Zayn, from that point, is (storyline) concussed. He loses his footing going for a clinching Helluva Kick, and Owens takes over. He is not shy about punching his defenseless “friend” in the head as many times as it takes, nor does he spare him any powerbombs. But Zayn keeps kicking out, won’t quit. Doctors come to the ring to check on Zayn, but it’s Owens who wants to end the match, so he keeps powerbombing Zayn until the referee calls for the bell, stopping the match on account of the champion’s inability to defend himself.

I often find myself unable to engage with NXT as much as I would like. The wrestling is great, world-beating even, and the storylines and writing are frequently so good that it’s hard to believe that the same company behind NXT does such a poor job with Raw and SmackDown! for roughly three-quarters of the calendar year, but I am, generally speaking, not for the “bubble universe” that filming shows in the same venue every single show engenders on a globally-televised product. It’s easy to tell when a crowd that has sat through four tapings of wrestling has become tired and cranky, sick of even their own inside jokes, and when an audience cheers for everything, it’s hard to get an idea of what will actually work on the main WWE stage. The live specials mitigate that somewhat, though chanting things like “HUG IT OUT” at Finn Bálor and Adrian Neville during a tense post-match showdown, or “Z-PAK” while doctors are checking Sami Zayn for a concussion makes me wonder if the people who get to see this stuff live are there for the wrestling or if they are Smart Internet Fans Who Listen to Podcasts and are there just to chant. I want NXT to tour in the worst way. I think that’s the next phase of this experiment, to test out how a guy like Sami Zayn will do in Iowa or North Dakota, where there are independent wrestling fans but not an arena full of them, all in a constant state of orgasm. When I watch NXT, I’m watching to see if these supremely talented men and women can rise above an audience trying its damnedest to turn every match into an instant classic, or if the studio audience is something of a crutch. NXT Takeover: Rival was an event where the majority of the card rose above the noise which so frequently reminds me that, in 2015, it is not possible to watch wrestling without also watching how others watch wrestling. With the exception of two very underwhelming matches, Rival was an instant classic show from the opening bell, capped by a match that rose to the challenge of meeting and exceeding not only a long, storied history of contests between its participants, but by a year that is already heavy with great professional wrestling. Those Smart Internet Fans reacted to Kevin Owens destroying Sami Zayn and the NXT Universe as if they had just seen The Undertaker lose at WrestleMania. People were crying. And Kevin Owens, once told that he didn’t fit the mould, stifled his own tears long enough to hold his newly won championship triumphantly over the corpse of a man he called a friend. Wrestling, especially at its most brutal, is beautiful.

Results
1. Hideo Itami def. Tyler Breeze via pinfall. Grade: B+
2. No Disqualification Match: Baron Corbin def. Bull Dempsey via pinfall. Grade: C-
3. NXT Tag Team Championships: Wesley Blake and Buddy Murphy (champions) def. The Lucha Dragons (Sin Cara and Kalisto) via pinfall. Grade: C-
4. Finals of the Tournament to Decide the #1 Contender for the NXT Championship: Finn Bálor def. Adrian Neville via pinfall. GRADE: A
5. NXT Women’s Championship: Sasha Banks def. Charlotte (champion), Bayley, and Becky Lynch via pinfall to win the championship. GRADE: A
6. NXT Championship: Kevin Owens def. Sami Zayn (champion) via referee’s decision to win the championship. GRADE: A+
February 16, 2015