Category: Essentials

Movie Review: Creed (2015)

It’s hard to write about Creed because it is a movie I fell in love with early and repeatedly, a film that had me on the verge of tears at times and past that verge at other times. So I’m going to start with what I found most impressive about director Ryan Coogler’s re-framing of Rocky and its legacy, which is that Creed has a heart of its own, not one merely borrowed from its predecessor. Considering that the likability of Rocky Balboa, one of the great screen characters of American history, is what propels the bulk of the franchise through bloat, bad script choices, and an inability to recall its own identity, Creed‘s ability to stand on its own merit is both necessary and surprising. Creed is less about the revitalization of a character that will see his 40th anniversary next year than it is about loving something so much that something new and, frankly, equal to the original is created.

It’s a Rocky film, so it is grounded largely in cliché. But, as the series has repeated over and over with a piston-like ferocity, it isn’t a fighters origins that matter so much as what he makes of them. To that end, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) was dealt a particularly bad hand of cards. The illegitimate son of boxing great Apollo Creed, Adonis is introduced as an orphan in a juvenile detention center, in lock-up for fighting to defend his dead mother’s name, which he later takes up as an adult looking to build his own name. He is adopted by Apollo’s wife (Phylicia Rashad) and raised in his home, but it’s obvious that he’s a second-class Creed: no gym will train him, and he’s stuck taking up bar fights on the weekend in Mexico for the experience. Self-taught and using his mother’s name so he can avoid the pressure of legacy, Adonis quits his job and rents a room in Philadelphia, hoping to convince his father’s former rival and training partner Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to come out of the shadows and become his trainer.

Creed recalls the narrative and structure of Rocky, playing on its themes and iconography in a way that would have been tired if this were once again a film about an aging Stallone putting on the gloves for one last fight. Wearing a hoodie and reading glasses, Rocky Balboa looks well past the aged, muscled fantasy warrior Stallone has been projecting for a decade now. He’s a hard worker whose instincts are keen, but Balboa is in his 70s and the torch he carried for so long, with his wife dead of cancer and his son estranged from him, is out. He’s a ghost, his image and name haunting Philadelphia and boxing, and Adonis finds him shuffling around a restaurant built to house both. There is the question of whether or not Rocky will train Adonis, but it’s never one that much hangs over the young Creed’s head. He came to Philadelphia with a purpose, and it’s clear that he’s going to try to achieve it with or without Balboa’s help.

That Adonis is always his own man in a film that could have easily become a redemption story is due largely to Creed‘s smart script, by Coogler and Aaron Covington. Creed is never not a Rocky film, but it’s never Rocky’s film—Stallone’s arc here is the B-story, it serves to complicate Adonis’ already complicated rise to boxing prominence, but it is told so well by Coogler and Covington and acted so well by Stallone that the melodrama outside the ring acts as Creed‘s driving force. A boxer’s life outside of boxing, in film and in reality, is necessarily reduced to recognizable, sellable figures: Balboa the working-class palooka; Creed the unknown orphan; and Creed’s eventual rival, “Pretty” Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew) the fighter who came from nothing and was compromised by his fame and fortune. Watching Creed, I thought of the year’s other boxing film, Southpaw, and how it reduced its fighters to the same necessary images. How the Rocky films after Rocky did the same. The assumption is that the audience’s payoff is a triumph of one body over another, which necessitates the long, erotic training sequences: if a man can transform his body enough, he can punch through any obstacle.

Creed‘s strength is knowing that there are some obstacles a boxer can’t beat. There’s time, which Balboa is fighting a losing battle against. There’s regret. There’s pride. There’s the possibility that a man’s passion and skill can very literally kill him or leave him damaged beyond repair. Winning a boxing match changes none of this, and a good boxing story knows it. A good boxing story can use that knowledge to make the rest of the boxer’s world seem sharper, more necessary than a judge’s decision at the end of 12 rounds, and Creed is a very good boxing story. It is capable, at times, of feeling like more than a boxing story. It’s the story of a city. It’s a romance. It’s all of these things at once. Trying to sleep after a particularly fruitless day, Adonis is kept awake by the louder than necessary music of his downstairs neighbor, Bianca (Tessa Thompson). She’s a beautiful woman, and Adonis falls for her immediately, but again Creed‘s script is so good that Bianca never feels ancillary until the structure of a boxing film makes her so. A talented singer coming up in Philadelphia’s club scene, Bianca suffers from progressive hearing loss and continues to make music though she’ll someday be unable to. She’s a character with her own dreams and ambitions, and, like a boxer, she’s racing against time to put together something meaningful, something that will last longer than a body that will progressively fail her. It’s something of a departure for a film like Creed that the relationship between a boxer and a woman goes two ways, that her desires are as large and as important as his, but for Coogler, the triumph of one man’s body over another is secondary to watching people create something from nothing: a relationship, a life.

If Creed falters, than it does so in its third act, where Bianca is largely Adonis’ cheerleader after the two have a falling out over a fight between he and a headlining musician at Bianca’s biggest gig. That she nails the show performance should feel triumphant, but Creed hasn’t quite figured out what to do with Bianca’s art beyond the fact that she makes it, and that its creation mirrors the way Adonis creates himself for the purpose of a fight. If there is a follow-up to Creed, then what’s already present here suggests that Coogler and his team are smart enough to not make the same decisions Stallone did decades ago, that he will focus on the humanity of Adonis and those around him, rather than the idea of him as a macho icon. Michael B. Jordan is clearly up to such a challenge, as are Stallone and Thompson. And if it is necessary to yield to the carnage of the ring (which, let’s be frank, it is), then at least boxing’s thrilling spectacle of excess seems as though its being put to some greater use, rather than being the end all of its players are the means to.

Creed (2015)

With Michael B. Jordan (Adonis Creed), Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Tessa Thompson (Bianca), and Phylicia Rashad (Mary Anne Creed). Directed by Ryan Coogler from a screenplay by Coogler and Aaron Covington, based on characters created by Stallone.

December 5, 2015
Movie Review: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Max Rockatansky is not his own man, never the focal point of the franchise that bears his name. He’s a cipher, a way for writer-director George Miller to slip into a ruined world, a world that’s too stupid to live and too stubborn to die. If the doomsday prepper set is right and there is something left of our world once we’re done hollowing it out and wasting it away, it’ll take more than a bunker full of Gatorade and beef jerky to survive what’s coming. Beyond any extreme, beyond Beyond Thunderdome, the argument George Miller has made over the course of four films and 36-years is that survival, on such a vast and awful scale, is not something you can prepare for, but is something that’s thrust upon a person, something one suffers until the world stops playing with its food and swallows whole. Max Rockatansky is mad, but he’s never his own man for long. First he’s eating, then he’s the property of a marauding band of chalk-painted dieselpirates, personal bloodbag for a dying lunatic soldier who’d like nothing more than to dip himself in chrome and punch his ticket to Valhalla. It’s one way of living when nothing’s meant to live, at least.

Mad Max: Fury Road starts hot and never lets up. It is two hours of tight, ferocious lunacy, audaciously shot and deftly edited, ugly to the point of surreal beauty, a bomb dropped in an era of action filmmaking cowed by expectation and formula. There has been nothing better since Terminator 2: Judgment Day. There has never been anything quite like it. Max (Tom Hardy) finds himself the hood ornament of a suicide engine that’s chasing after a woman, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), who has made off with the brides of a warlord (Hugh Keays-Byrne) that figured out a way of pumping clean water up from the bowels of the earth. That he has carved something beautiful out of the desert is beyond the point—Immortan Joe can turn the water off and on as he pleases, and that makes him the figurehead of one of the most perverse cults in film history. He counts his army not in henchmen, but in lumpen blobs of flesh and apocalyptic guitar players, chalkfaced worshipers at the altar of American muscle and syphilitic bankers who kill for sport while complaining of the cost. The goal for Furiosa and the brides—several of whom are pregnant via rape—is unspecific even by the standards of a Mad Max film, a “Green Space” where they can live, provided for and protected. Immortan Joe wants these women back. His warriors hope that he will escort them to Valhalla. To say that Furiosa’s cause is doomed is obvious. In a world like this, all causes are.

Of course, Miller’s film has unending potential as thinkpiece material. That The Vagina Monologues‘ Eve Ensler was hired as a consultant and that Furiosa is ostensibly the protagonist in a film bearing the name of a man made Fury Road the subject of a pitiful boycott on the part of the toxic men’s rights movement. The women in this film seek revenge and/or redemption from their rapist. Max spends nearly a third of the film strapped to a cross, giving his blood to an undeserving sinner (Nicholas Hoult). Immortan Joe calls his water supply Aqua Cola, which is something of a throwaway line until you remember that companies like Nestlé have been working for years to privatize that very resource and are run by men who have flat-out said that water is not a basic human right. Yes, yes, but all of this is secondary to the filmmaking, which is trash-beautiful to a point I didn’t believe even George Miller capable of. If you can call the grease and grunge and engine exhaust of Mad Max an aesthetic, then this permutation of the series is that aesthetic at its peak, inviting us to delight and disgust in its orgy of mutants, cars, and war.

Fury Road is fast, and not in an illusionary sense. Too many action movies are edited to compensate for a lack of physicality, the absence of actors in real space or a dearth of body to body contact. Think of how The Avengers cuts from a CGI Iron Man punching a CGI Hulk to Robert Downey, Jr.’s face, eyes scanning a CGI computer readout. Or how an action movie sans an “action star” cuts away from a punch, using rapid editing and sound design to imply the force of a blow. Miller and cinematographer John Seale want something more. They want us to taste gasoline in our mouths and feel the sun blazing on our necks. They want every bullet to matter and every twisted wreck to cause one to wince. Their camera hovers over Immortan Joe’s armada like a buzzard looking to pick clean the bones of whatever dies first. I don’t want to say that every action movie should be shot like this, but if every action movie had even an ounce of this one’s unflinching courage to just be different, there’d never be cause to leave the multiplex. But that’s not the world we live in, and, as such, Mad Max: Fury Road is less a breath of fresh air than it is one giant gulp after another after clawing oneself out of an airless grave. We emerge to a world ruined beyond any hope of repair. Increasingly, it’s the only one left to love.

Mad Max: Fury Road. With Tom Hardy (Max Rockatansky), Charlize Theron (Imperator Furiosa), Nicholas Hoult (Nux), Zoë Kravitz (Toast), Hugh Keays-Byrne (Immortan Joe), and Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus). Directed by George Miller, from a screenplay by Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nick Lathouris.

May 15, 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: 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
Movie Review: Life Itself (2014)

I’ve been avoiding Life Itself for a long time, as a book and as a film. A paperback copy of Roger Ebert’s memoir is there on my coffee table, between my chair and the screen I watch movies on. I know that cover intimately: The red velvet of the movie theater seats, his black silhouette before an endless screen that could not exist in any reality but one liberally embellished by the mind. I’ve seen movies in the same theater as Ebert, eaten a meal in the same room as him, too. In this documentary, Time Magazine‘s Richard Corliss says that Roger Ebert had been writing about film for half of its existence. He’d been writing about film for the whole duration of my life, was a fixture on T.V. every Friday. He’s been part of my life as a filmgoer and as a writer for as long as I’ve seriously been either of those things, and yet Life Itself loomed ominously, its mere existence a threat. But to what, I wondered, pulling myself through Steve James’ documentary.

There’s very little about Roger Ebert that isn’t already public record. As an extension of the speaking voice he lost through several surgeries related to thyroid cancer, he launched Roger Ebert’s Journal in 2008 and began blogging regularly in addition to his duties as the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times. At first, the blog was mostly a supplement to his reviews. There were bits about his status as the only film critic who liked the new Indiana Jones film, his distaste for 3D, and so on, but every now and again there’d be an essay about science fiction or his childhood obsession with the news, something about his life, and it became very clear that Roger Ebert’s Journal wasn’t going to be a typical blog for very long. Once, he wrote that his wife Chaz was bugging him to start writing a memoir. Then his blog began exploring his life in admirable detail: His childhood, his relationship with Russ Meyer, his alcoholism, his marriage. He was writing a working draft of Life Itself the whole time, from 2008 to the publication of the memoir. It was an admirable project, one, he said, that marked the final stage of his life.

I suppose that’s what I feared: Closure. Which, I realize, is an odd thing to seek from an online relationship between a blogger and a member of his commentariat. But he had an odd way of making such a small relationship seem important. I read Ebert’s website every day for years, trying to better myself as a critic. I dropped comments here and there. Sometimes Ebert would comment back, which was thrilling stuff to a know-nothing college undergraduate whose own blog was a repository of snark and near-opinion on whatever I’d spent the weekend assaulting my brain with. When one of his blog posts became a cookbook, several of my comments were included, and suddenly I was a published author. I put this on my CV, sent it to a few colleges, and all of the sudden I was a graduate student. This was life-changing stuff for me, though it was probably nothing for him. My family still talks about it. Still. When this documentary was on CNN the other day, I got text messages from my mother. It was all I saw on Twitter. For a long time, closure meant acknowledging that whatever project Roger Ebert had embarked on was finished. Watching Life Itself, it quickly became clear how wrong I was.

Steve James’ documentary is Ebert’s conscious attempt at adapting his book into a film. Initially, that’s how the project is framed: James interviewing the living subjects of the book about Ebert and their role in his life, and interviewing the film critic to dig a little deeper into certain sections of his story, be that his connection with the city of Chicago or his debate with Corliss in the pages of Film Comment or the future of film criticism as the Internet continued to grow, presumably shrinking the influence of the daily newspaper in the process. But as Life Itself opens, Ebert is back in the hospital for a hairline fracture of his hip. Soon, he will realize that the fracture was caused by metastasized tumors, a return of cancer. He will go on as long as he can, but he is frequently too tired for filming or to answer James’ questions, so the director must go back to the book, fleshing out this story he’s stumbled onto, of a beloved literary figure who, for so long, has refused to die.

Again, there’s little that Ebert has left out of the public eye, so for a reader of his blog or memoir, there’s little new information to be parsed. The inclusion of Ebert’s friends and family, his wife and old drinking buddies like John McHugh, the women who produced his television show and Gene Siskel’s wife Marlene Iglitzen all serve to add perspective to the singular voice of the memoir. The expected things are covered: His was a wide experience, fondly remembered. If he could be difficult, then it was for the betterment of whatever he was working on, or because he had a competitive edge that raised the game of those he worked with. The rehab sessions James witnessed were taken from his fifth visit to the clinic. He was relearning how to walk again, indefatigable. He seemed genuinely excited when James was there capturing that process, or, even better, when the camera was on to see a nurse suctioning his G-tube. A scene where Ebert is fumbling with his computer speakers while the nurse and Chaz wait around impatiently to get the suction over with becomes strange and beautiful when he manages finally to plug the jack in. The song is Steely Dan’s “Reeling in the Years,” and though what he’s enduring can’t be comfortable, he looks relieved, blissful even, as if he knows the music means James got a better shot.

As for the question of how to make a film about a film critic, James lets Ebert’s writing and the films he wrote about do the bulk of the work, utilizing clips from Bonnie and Clyde, El Norte, and other films Ebert gave glowing reviews to while voice actor Stephen Stanton reads the review. Moreover, Ebert’s words appear captioned on the screen, giving new life to old film reviews while showing the intimate relationship art might enjoy with art criticism were the two to be treated with equanimity. Of late (and due, perhaps in part, to the large influence of Siskel & Ebert, which was never intended as serious criticism but was frequently treated as such), it seems like film and film criticism are moving farther and farther apart. A bad review of a popular film is said to be written for attention. The influence of a popular film critic means less now than it did when Siskel and Ebert spent a year stumping for Gates of Heaven on national television.

But this is the project Ebert had undertaken in the very last days of his life, the expansion of his online reach and the opening of a new channel for young, unknown critics to develop their skills and make their voices heard. After years of breaking filmmakers like Scorcesse, Herzog, Bahrani, and James, his final project was a way of saying that the work is never done. James’ camera shows Ebert scrolling down the contributors’ page of his then yet-to-be-launched website. So many of those faces belonged to women or persons of color. All of them were of people he had influenced, in some way, to write about film. It’s a stunning gesture, allowing his name to amplify the voices of so many others, but he seemed to regard the Internet as the future of film criticism rather than its end. That isn’t closure, but a new frontier. His work continues, though not under his byline. He wrote of movies as a machine that generates empathy. By giving of himself so fully to this one, he ultimately proved his point.

Life Itself. A documentary, directed by Steve James. Based upon the memoir Life Itself, by Roger Ebert.

January 7, 2015
Wrestling Review: NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 9 (1/4/15)

I’ve dabbled in New Japan Pro Wrestling since the dawn of streaming video websites. Though nobody who documents the internet will give credit where its due, the success of sites like YouTube and Dailymotion, at least back when the Internet was the Wild West, had at least a little to do with the sheer amount of Japanese professional wrestling uploaded to those services, thirty years of content long relegated to video tapes and DVDs swapped endlessly through the mail now available to anybody with a working connection and a little bit of patience. Japanese wrestling promotions like NJPW and NOAH were slow to capitalize on American demand for their product, which is fair considering how most acquired access to it illegally—hardly how one wants to gauge a potential audience—but now, as NJPW is in the middle of a ridiculously successful period, the proliferation of online streaming technology has made it possible not only for the promotion to launch their own WWE Network-like online site, but for nebulous, ill-defined groups like Jeff Jarrett’s Global Force Wrestling to offer English-speaking fans a chance to watch the show with the benefit of an English broadcast. NJPW is reaching out with Wrestle Kingdom 9, and it’ll be very interesting to see how their first real foray into the American market fares.

I’m hardly a Japanophile—pretty much all of the Japanese I know is actually English words for wrestling maneuvers, made Japanese through pronunciation—but I’ve always liked the Japanese broadcasts. Though I can’t understand much of what is being said, wrestling itself is a universal language, and the story the announcers are telling is modulated through the way they yell for big spots or get really quiet when a popular grappler appears to be fading in a submission move. But Global Force Wrestling’s big card was the signing of WWE Hall of Fame announcer Jim Ross to serve as play-by-play for the event, and Ross is a favorite of mine, really my idol given my brief stint in the industry. Of less interest (really a detriment, if you ask me) was their bringing in Matt Striker, a former WWE color commentator, to serve as Ross’ second. Striker has always been an annoyance, a dude who makes up facts and hideous nicknames and talks over the other announcers, usually while slipping in bits and pieces of lame right-wing propaganda to his commentary, but he somehow has a cult following among folks who’ve grown tired of the Michael Cole/JBL/Jerry Lawler desk and he’s good enough at feigning knowledge, so he’s here to lead the audience of supposed newbies through their first NJPW show.

This is the broadcast I’ve chosen to go with. NJPW will soon be debuting a television show in the United States, and this version of Wrestle Kingdom 9, I figure, is a good preview for how that show will be presented. The footage I was able to procure is without the pre-show battle royal (a shame, because I’d love to hear Jim Ross call The Great Kabuki in 2015) and the opening ceremonies of the event. If I am able to get that footage later, I’ll be sure to add it to this post, which, I’ll warn you right now, is going to run long. Pack a lunch, folks.

IWGP JR. HEAVYWEIGHT TAG TEAM CHAMPIONSHIP: ReDRagon (Kyle O’Reilly and Bobby Fish, champions) def. The Young Bucks (Matt and Nick Jackson), Forever Hooligans (Alex Kozlov and Rocky Romero), and Time Splitters (Alex Shelly and KUSHIDA) via pinfall. GRADE: B.

The first match is a four team sprint for the most exciting championship in professional wrestling, and features four of the best tag teams in the world today. The Young Bucks are probably the most popular tag team on the American independent scene. ReDRagon are one of the best elements of Ring of Honor, a pairing that completely redefined what most thought of O’Reilly and Fish. Time Splitters and Forever Hooligans are both former champions and perennial contenders for these titles. The only man team in the match at a potential disadvantage here is the Time Splitters, as KUSHIDA doesn’t travel to the United States with his partner Alex Shelly, and thus hasn’t seen as much of ReDRagon as the Young Bucks, Forever Hooligans (who spent a little time in ROH over the past two years), and Shelly. During introductions, Matt Striker says that the Young Bucks have “only” been wrestling 10 or 11 years but are “already” revolutionizing tag team wrestling, which is weird. He also says that the Forever Hooligans are great, communism aside. Ugh. Jim Ross says that, as an old Oakie, he’s going to stick with calling the International Wrestling Grand Prix (the fake governing body of NJPW’s championships) just plain ol’ IWGP. That’s what everybody does, so it’s okay, Jim.

Right away, it’s kind of cool to hear Jim Ross and Matt Striker talking about Ring of Honor. It brings back the idea of wrestling as a global entertainment, which was something frequently emphasized by all of the major American wrestling promotions during different times in the 1990s. WCW in particular worked in tandem with NJPW frequently, mentioning results from “Egg Dome” shows and allowing their championships to be defended on huge New Japan cards, tracing back a lot of their Cruiserweight Championship lineage to their “When Worlds Collide” show from AAA in Mexico. ROH and NJPW have a much younger working relationship (ROH used to work with NOAH, when that was the promotion ROH’s fans preferred), but ReDRagon holding the IWGP Jr. Heavyweight and ROH World Tag Team Championships makes them the best pound-for-pound team in the world according to Striker and Ross, and that’s hard to argue. Also hard to argue: Bobby Fish has the best facial hair in professional wrestling.

KUSHIDA starts off against Bobby Fish. Normal tag team rules apply, first team to score a pinfall or a submission win the titles. KUSHIDA begins by outwrestling Bobby Fish, his MMA background and quickness allowing him to outmaneuver Fish’s technical wrestling ability. The two go for dropkicks at the same time and KUSHIDA is back to his feet first, so his second dropkick connects. That brings in Kyle O’Reilly, who comes in without a tag. This confuses Ross a little, as the referee doesn’t seem to care too much, and Striker says that “wrestling is what triumphs,” which, I guess, means you can do whatever you want so long as you’re wrestling. The referee is motioning to the corner, telling O’Reilly to get out of there, but whatever. O’Reilly kicks KUSHIDA into the ropes and whips him across, but Shelly has tagged in without the champion noticing. Shelly punches him in the gut and KUSHIDA follows up with a knee strike to the side of the head.

That brings the Young Bucks in, and the Bullet Club members quickly go to the eyes of Shelly and Kushida, give each other nWo too sweets, give the Time Splitters the DX crotch chop, and are promptly back body dropped out of the ring. Shelly goes back to Fish, wrings the arm and tags in KUSHIDA. He wrings the arm and tags in Shelly, who wrings the arm and tags in KUSHIDA, and they are officially SPLITTING TIME. Or Bobby Fish’s arm. Fish gets tired of that business and shoves KUSHIDA into Shelly, knocking Shelly off the apron onto the floor. Fish whips KUSHIDA into the ropes. Alex Kozlov tags in off the whip. Fish goes down for a back body drop and gets kicked in the mush by KUSHIDA, who goes to follow up but is sent out of the ring by the referee, who looks to make up for earlier by being overzealous on the tag, which he saw, and which matters because tagging in and out is a part of tag team wrestling, which is what triumphs.

Kozlov ducks a strike by Fish and runs off the ropes. Fish goes for a side slam but Kozlov’s momentum allows him to catch the champion in a spinning head scissors. Kozlov scores with a dropkick and calls for his Cossack hat, which he puts on so that he can dance around the ring, kicking Fish in the head. Oh yes. He double stomps Fish’s head to the ground and goes for the cover on Fish, who has been in the ring for a long time now, but Fish kicks out at two. Kozlov ends up in ReDRagon’s corner and can’t fight his way out. Fish sneaks to the outside and sweeps Kozlov’s leg, which allows O’Reilly to drop a knee on him. Ross, noticing the lack of a tag, brings up that old announcer standby of maybe having two referees out there to keep track of things like tags, and that’s one of my favorite announcer suggestions, so I’ll let it stand. The referee, for his part, is like, “Oh, hey, Kyle O’Reilly, did you make the tag?” and O’Reilly is like “Whatever, dad” before kicking Kozlov in the back and wagging his finger at the world, so he is now the legal man, at least until he tags Fish back in, negating his unfairly gained advantage.

Fish runs off the ropes and dives at Kozlov, hitting him with a flying double forearm and landing with an impact that sounds like a cannon being fired in an arena. He hooks Kozlov’s leg on the cover and gets a near fall. Alex Shelly keeps coming in to break up the pinfall, which hasn’t needed breaking up, and this is what has the referee so distracted. O’Reilly picks Kozlov off but gets punched. This sends him staggering into the corner of Matt and Nick Jackson, who both tag in. This is illegal and they know it, but they’re in the Bullet Club and are thus not nice people, so they get into the ring at the same time and clear the apron of the other five men in the match. They aren’t just innovative, according to Matt Striker. They’re “uniquely innovative.”

The Bucks are alone in the ring with Alex Kozlov. They go for a double team back suplex, but Kozlov lands on his feet. He fights one out of the ring, but that allows him to get tripped up as he runs at the other. Matt Jackson holds Kozlov on the outside while Nick runs at him, but Kozlov ducks, and the kick meant for him smacks off the face of Matt Jackson. Kozlov gets back into the ring and tries to tag out, but Nick Jackson keeps him out of a corner. Kozlov ducks a spinning roundhouse kick but runs into a back elbow. Nick goes for a superkick, but Kozlov moves and ends up hitting a spinning kick of his own! Kozlov tags out to Rocky Romero, who hits a springboard dropkick on an encroaching ReDRagon. He tries to kick Nick Jackson in the gut, but Jackson catches the leg. Romero misses an enziguri but recovers to kick Jackson in the face anyhow. With four men in four turnbuckles, Romero begins charging around the ring like a raging bull, hitting a series of clotheslines in succession. Just when the Young Bucks think they’ve escaped Romero’s clothesline fury, they’re caught with a double clothesline that has both of them spun inside out! Romero and Kozlov are in the ring now and do some double team work on Matt Jackson, who kness out of a double suplex attempt. KUSHIDA tags himself into the match and clears the ring of his opposition, rallying the fans behind the Time Splitters.

Romero tries to attack KUSHIDA but is sent over the top rope. KUSHIDA directs traffic, and Alex Shelly leaps off the apron with a knee strike to Romero. Time Splitters have the advantage as everything breaks down, with Shelly outside the ring hitting a superkick. KUSHIDA looks to start a dive but is stopped by Rocky Romero, who finishes KUSHIDA’s thought by diving onto Shelly and O’Reilly. His partner Alex Kozlov soon follows with a tope con hilo onto the pile. Matt Jackson dives through the ropes and dropkicks everybody but skins the cat, showing off his athletic ability while his brother dives over him with a corkscrew plancha to the floor. Striker mentions how innovative the Young Bucks are for the seventh or eighth time, bringing WWE-style overstatement to the Tokyo Dome at last. KUSHIDA finally gets to dive now, going Swanton off the top rope and to the floor. Legal man no longer matters as the Time Splitters work over the Young Bucks. Their Outta Time neckbreaker/moonsault combination gets a two count before it is broken up, so they go into their double team routine. Forever Hooligans break this up initiating a sequence of strikes that ends up with the Young Bucks throwing superkicks around. Matt saves Nick from a doomsday device, but not for long as Shelly and Kozlov join up, just this once, to put the Bucks down. They put the brothers up on their shoulders as Alex Kozlov flies off for a double clothesline, which connects, but the Bucks land on their feet! Superkicks all around, and then the Bucks hit the Meltzer Driver!

That gets a two count, as everybody is in to break it up. Lots of bodies in the ring now as Fish and O’Reilly try in vain to slow things down. They get a handspring back elbow from KUSHIDA for their trouble, and he gets a double superkick for his. The Bucks go for their More Back For Your Buck finish, but ReDRagon break it up, and Kyle O’Reilly officially tags in. He and Fish take over on Alex Shelly, hitting a backbreaker/knee drop combination, then a double arm DDT/wheelbarrow suplex combo. Fish executes a top rope falcon arrow. O’Reilly picks Kozlov up for a suplex but gets small packaged for a two. O’Reilly gets some payback with a couple of hard strikes on Kozlov, who is quickly taken over with a Bobby Fish exploder suplex. O’Reilly picks Kozlov up into suplex position and Fish kicks the Hooligan in the back of the head before his partner finishes with a brainbuster. That’s their finisher, and Alex Shelly is too late jumping into the ring to break it up.

A great match in terms of the number of cool-looking sequences, but that’s really all this was. The Jr. Heavyweight tag team division is used here to establish a quick pace and up-beat mood for these big shows, and that’s perfectly fine. I prefer matches to have something more going for them then just moves, but that’s probably just me.

Hiroyoshi Tenzan, Satoshi Kojima, and Tomoki Honma def. Jeff Jarrett, Bad Luck Fale, and Yujiro Takahashi via pinfall. GRADE: C.

I groaned mightily when old bro Jeff Jarrett, wrestling cockroach, debuted in New Japan as part of the reformulated Bullet Club, which needed Double J and AJ Styles to compensate for Fergal Devitt’s departure for World Wrestling Entertainment. His sad sack TNA entrance music plays, which is at least better than Kid Rock’s “Cowboy,” or any number of mock country & western shitkickers he was saddled with a dog’s age ago. I guess Scott D’Amore is also in Bullet Club. He must have bought his Bullet Club blazer from Pro Wrestling Tees. Bad Luck Fale is a big ol’ Tongan, which wrestling doesn’t have enough of in 2014, and Takahashi is a dirtier, Japanese Val Venis, which rules.

Their opponents are a crew of New Japan stalwarts. Tenzan was my least favorite NJPW representative who frequently moonlighted in WCW as a member of nWo Japan, but I was a dumb child, so what did I know. Kojima has been kicking around New Japan forever, as well, and Honma is making his name after spending a lot of time on the Japanese independent circuit. Formerly a deathmatch wrestler, his tights now say HONMANIA on them in Hulkamania font, which is amazing. I hope he pops Jeff Jarrett with some light tubes before dropping the big leg. Six man tag team matches often feel like they’re just a way of getting folks on a card, but who knows. The Bullet Club angle doesn’t feel as hot or magical as it did to me when Devitt was its leader, but it’s still a big deal, and if this is part of New Japan reasserting the honor and purity of professional wrestling in the face of a billion crotch chops, then I’m on board.

The match begins with Karen Jarrett shoving Honma, which isn’t the best way to begin things. The Bullet Club starts brawling immediately. Jarrett is on Honma, Takahashi on Tenzan, and Fale on Kojima. Tenzan and Kojima fight back and lift the massive Fale for a double suplex. Striker says that Fale is the hoss of the team, “hoss” being a word that needs to be stricken from wrestling’s dictionary unless Ross is saying it. Jarrett brawls with Honma on the outside while Ross puts some of the spotlight on referee Tiger Hatori, which is a cool thing to do. Kojima gets Takahashi in the corner and chops him a dozen times while the Tokyo Dome crowd HEYs along with each one. He whips Takahashi across the ring and follows in with a leaping forearm. Ross calls Kojima’s Ace Crusher both the RKO and Diamond Cutter, and now I’m kinda sad because “ACE CRUSHAAAAAA” is one of my favorite things to hear on a Japanese broadcast. Kojima takes too much time to rally the fans and gets crushed by a charging Bad Luck Fale. Hatori sends him out of the ring while Takahaski tags in Double J. He comes in kicking and punching and gets a two count off of a clothesline. Striker praises Jarrett for holding over 70 championships, many of them as prestigious as the 120 held by Jerry “The King” Lawler.

Jarrett tags in Fale, who bullies Kojima back to the canvas before tagging Takahashi back in. He slaps Kojima around and challenges him to fight back. Kojima does, hitting the cocky young adult film star with a forearm. Takahashi knows he doesn’t want to be involved in a slugfest, so he rakes the eyes. Matt Striker claims that the Japanese are unfamiliar with disrespect in professional wrestling. Considering that New Japan invented the nWo and ran their own version of it longer and more successfully than WCW way before Bullet Club, not to mention the long and tremendous history of really mean American wrestlers coming in and attacking fans at ringside, this is another thing Matt Striker is making up. Kojima hits his ace crusher and tags in Honma. Honma takes Bullet Club out before returning his attention to Takahashi, body slamming him to the canvas. In the corner, Takahashi eats a diving elbow and a bulldog. Honma psyches himself up and goes for a headbutt, but he misses. Takahashi follows up with a suplex that verges pretty close to a brainbuster, and gets a two count on his stunned foe. Takahashi continues to press his advantage until he charges at Honma, who gets his headbutt in.

Karen Jarrett distracts Tiger Hatori, so Jeff Jarrett enters the ring with his guitar. Honma blocks Jarrett’s attempted el-kabong, but Takahashi enters the ring and holds Honma up. Jarrett swings and Honma moves, so Takahashi eats Jarrett’s wood while Striker chuckles about it because that’s what you do when calling a wrestling match where a man hits another man with a guitar. Tenzan and Kojima come in and hit Jarrett with a double back suplex and take care of Fale by clotheslining him over the top rope. Striker calls this a “lariato” because he was watching the same YouTube matches I was 10 years ago, I guess, or to make himself seem more authentic to any potential Japanese girlfriends.

Takahashi eats a double team Ace Crusher, and Jim Ross is an adorable American wrestling fan for calling it the 3D and asking where the Dudley Boys are. Honma calls for his top rope headbutt and hits it without much of a problem and scores the pinfall. Nothing wrong there, just a solid six man tag with a good prospect in Honma being given the gift of a victory on the biggest show of the year by two of its most respected wrestlers. I think this qualifies as the first Jeff Jarrett match I’ve enjoyed since his feud with Booker T 15 years ago, so congratulations Jeff Jarrett.

Toru Yano, Naomichi Marufuji, Mikey Nicholls, and Shane Haste def. Takashi Iizuka, Shelton “X” Benjamin, Lance Archer, and Davey Boy Smith Jr. via pinfall. GRADE: C+

Jim Ross doesn’t have a chance to catch his breath, as the next match starts just as soon as Honma, Tenzan, and Kojima take their celebration to the entrance ramp. Iizuka, Benjamin, Archer, and Smith are all members of a huge, all-encompassing stable led by to the ring by TAKA Michinoku, who is ageless and wonderful and also not wrestling tonight. Iizuka, who I have not seen much of at all, looks like a total crazyman. I already love him. He used to partner with Toru Yano, but he stabbed him in the back to join Suzukigun, and Yano went to Pro Wrestling NOAH for the three men who will team with him for this match. I’ve not kept track of NOAH at all and am thus only familiar with Marufuji, who is really good. Really good. Like, really good, guys. He is the GHC Heavyweight Champion, which is a big deal even if you’ve never heard of it. Nicholls and Haste are the team known as TMDK, The Mighty Don’t Kill. Yano has a staple gun, so I guess he, too, is a crazyman, though less of a Bruiser Brody crazyman and more of a deathmatch crazyman. I’m kind of at a loss here because I like the idea of NOAH guys more than I like the idea of WWE guys, but I like ugly beards and weird faces more than I like staple guns. LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

What happens is a brawl, which, you know, there are eight people in the ring, so why not. Yano and Iizuka end up in the ring together. Yano hits Iizuka with a BRAIN CHOP, which is my favorite wrestling move without question, but Iizuka is unfazed and takes the fight to his former partner. He goes to strangle Yano with a piece of rope, but Yano ducks it and pulls on the beard. The referee breaks this up, which gets Iizuka angry because his beard got tugged harder, and while Iizuka is doing a crazyman stumble, Yano takes of the turnbuckle covering, which, in Japan, exposes all three turnbuckles at once. Iizuka picks up the turnbuckle pad and smashes Yano with it, which is like hitting somebody with a body pillow. Yano goes down hard, because this is a pillow fight with hate.

Iizuka tags in Shelton Benjamin, who was a fine wrestler at the Intercontinental Championship level in WWE, capable of great matches but never possessing much in the way of character. Thankfully, that’s not much of a problem in NJPW. He immediately hits Yano with one of his trademark maneuvers, a swinging kick to the mouth, and tags in Lance Archer. I haven’t seen much of Archer in NJPW because I usually skip his matches, but when he was a member of WWE’s ECW roster, he was a boring dude with a hideous lower back tattoo. Here he enters the ring with his partner Davey Boy Smith Jr., son of the British Bulldog and tag team specialist, and the two hit Yano with a Hart Attack, patterned off of Davey Boy’s uncles Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart. Archer can’t maintain the advantage for long, though, and Yano soon tags out to one member of TMDK, which brings them both in to work on Archer. That brings in Davey Boy Smith Jr., and it’s TMDK vs. KES, with both teams looking pretty evenly matched. Lance Archer can’t hit the chokeslam he’s looking for until he does, and when he does, man does he get some good height on it. Jim Ross, who has seen a billion chokeslams, digs this one, so you know it’s pretty good.

Iizuka is tagged back in, but Marufuji is in this match for the first time now, and he is a house of fire, which is wrestlingspeak for well-rested and ready to go. Iizuka whips Marufuji into the turnbuckles but is stopped by a kick, then is stopped by many kicks. The crowd welcomes Marufuji back into the auspices of NJPW while he gets a two count on Iizuka. Marufuji goes for Sliced Bread #2 but is posted, allowing Shelton Benjamin to leap up after him and belly-to-belly suplex him all the way across the goddamn ring! With TAKA and co. running interference outside the ring, Iizuka dons the most ridiculous pair of brass knuckles I’ve ever seen and misses when he takes a swing at Marufuji. The GHC Champion takes care of an interfering El Desperado on the ring apron, but gets caught with an Iizuka Manhattan drop. Iizuka goes into his tights and retrieves a piece of rope, which he uses to strangle NOAH’s ace. As soon as Iizuka lets go, though, Marufuji recovers and catches him under the chin with a wicked knee lift. Marufuji calls in his TMDK teammates, who tandem gorilla press Iizuka to the lights. They swing him down hard to the canvas and pick him up for Marufuji, who is calling the shots. He crushes Iizuka with another knee lift, and that is the end of Iizuka.

The camerawork never quite picked up on the constant ringside interference of Suzukigun on the outside, so this never quite felt like an upset or come from behind victory. Oddly for a match with betrayal at its center, Marufuji and TMDK are the conquering heroes of this match, mostly relegating Yano to the sidelines. I’ve got no idea if that means they’re sticking around for awhile, but I wouldn’t mind it. I continue to really enjoy Marufuji’s work and was impressed by what I saw out of Haste and Nicholls. Matt Striker continues to congratulate the winners of the match, which is my least favorite thing about his commentary. Coming from a quasi-heel color guy, it seems suspiciously hollow. Stop it, dude.

Minoru Suzuki def. Kazushi Sakuaba via referee stoppage. GRADE: B+

Jim Ross gets serious, as “this match has been a lifetime in the making.” Both men are protégés of Karl Gotch and Billy Robinson, which is as wrestling as wrestling gets. Ross calls them their finest students, which is pretty goddamn high praise. Striker goes over Suzuki’s history as a mixed martial artist, which is vast and deep, and in Japan the two artforms, wrestling and MMA, have always had an easier time of commingling. Striker says that this contest is being fought under UWF-I rules, which I did not know about going in. That is very exciting to me, because pretty much the only MMA I ever got into was Noboshoku Takada’s long-defunct shoot promotion. Volk Han, baby. Lou Thesz’s original World’s Heavyweight Championship, brother. Very serious and regal stuff. Beautiful, elegant carnage. The rules here: You can only win by submission, knockout, or referee stoppage. Ross puts Suzuki over as a legit psychopath. Sakuaba hits the ring next to his crazy dance megamix of a theme song. He’s the greatest MMA fighter in the history of Japan, has beaten a bunch of Gracies, etc. Striker figures that if there’s ever going to be a real MMA hall of fame, these men are the first two that need to be inducted. That’s great, but I’m sick and tired of this hall of fame junk being a talking point in combat sports, sports entertainment, or anything, really. I just want blood.

The fans are into this before the bell rings, as they should be: It’s the first one-on-one match between the two. They circle , and Sakuaba goes behind Suzuki with a waistlock. They exchange go-behinds and hit the mat. Suzuki tries to gain control, but Sakuaba sweeps the leg, and both men get back to their feet. Applause from the crowd. Knuckle lock, quickly broken by Sakuaba, who goes for a single leg takedown. Suzuki widens his base to block it, then walks Sakuaba around and tries to sit out on him, but Sakuaba is able to roll through. Suzuki is in guard and Sakuaba kicks at his leg before leaping over Suzuki, which is a tactical error because he almost ends up in a kneebar. He stands, though, and goes for a sharpshooter (or the power lock, as it’s known in Japan), but it’s way too early for that and Suzuki turns out of it. They roll into the ropes and the referee calls for a break, but neither man wants to give it.

Finally, they do, but rather than returning to a neutral position, Suzuki rolls out of the ring. Sakuaba kicks at him through the ropes and Suzuki responds with some open hand strikes. They keep fighting in the ropes until Suzuki catches an arm and goes into a triangle chokes over the ropes. Suzuki breaks and drops to the floor, dragging Sakuaba out after him. We’re transitioning out of MMA and into pro wrestling now, as Suzuki walks Sakuaba out onto the walkway and snapmares the PANCRASE founder onto it. Suzuki puts Sakuaba into a seated position and walks up the ramp, presumably to charge his opponent, but Sakuaba is up quickly and catches Suzuki with a roundhouse kick. They’re exchanging strikes on the ramp. There is no countout, so they can fight there all they want. A few of Sakuaba’s kicks find their mark, and he sinks in a kimura on the ramp. The match can only end in the ring, but hey, if you break a dude’s forearm or wrist, you’re probably going to win the match. The referee successfully convinces Sakuaba to release the kimura and go back to the ring. Suzuki is going to have to deal with his arm for the rest of the match.

Once the two are back in the ring, Sakuaba continues to assault Suzuki with a series of hard kicks to the chest. The referee backs Sakuaba off and begins a standing 10 count. Suzuki’s facial expression is pure murder as he gets to his feet. He shrugs off some kicks and lands a hard shot to Sakuaba’s jaw! They palm strike each other simultaneously, but it’s clear that Suzuki has the power here, and he knocks Sakuaba to the canvas! Suzuki backs off for the 10 count, but Sakuaba is back to his feet and back to throwing kicks. Suzuki shouts them off, so Sakuaba goes back to the arm, rolling through his own key lock attempt into a potential cross armbreaker. Suzuki locks his hands, though and nearly counters it, but Sakuaba stays on it and breaks Suzuki’s grip! Suzuki is in serious pain now, but is close enough to the ropes that he can hook them with his foot, earning a break.

Sakuaba kicks at Suzuki’s arm, invites him to his feet, then kicks him in the arm some more. He gets some old-fashioned wrestling stomps in and then calls for the standing 10 count. Suzuki is feeling it, he looks a bit shaken, and what was once murder has turned, perhaps, to fear, but he’s up at nine. Sakuaba returns to his kicks, but Suzuki isn’t having any of them. He lands another palm strike. They exchange kicks and palm strikes. Suzuki invites Sakuaba to kick his injured arm and just takes it, continuing to counter with palm strikes. He catches a kick and lands another strike, then knocks Sakuaba to the canvas with one and follows up by kicking his face in. He could ask for a 10 count, but no. Sakuaba is defenseless, and Suzuki puts him in a rear-naked choke. He turns his hips and slings Sakuaba over, still in the choke! He wants to end this match now, and this is his best shot. Sakuaba says no, waving the referee off, but Suzuki will not let go. Sakuaba goes limp, and the referee calls for the bell.

I love worked shoot wrestling; I think it is one of the best things that ever happened to professional wrestling. This wasn’t a classic, I don’t think, as the ramp fighting was a bit gratuitous and I could have gone for more fighting, but the closing sequence was nasty, and Suzuki’s rear-naked choke a thing of beauty. Sakuaba wakes up a bit stunned while everybody is iced down. Matt Striker is sad that there aren’t men like Suzuki or Sakuaba around anymore. Matt Striker is not a man like Suzuki or Sakuaba and should probably shut up. Sakuaba offers his hand and Suzuki takes it. Everybody is super happy about it, as they should be. On his way out of the arena, Suzuki takes off his ice pack because he doesn’t give a damn.

Jim Ross loves that NJPW doesn’t screw around and keep people waiting, and neither do I. Led Zep’s “Immigrant Song” starts playing, which, ha, how goddamn rad, and it’s time for our next match.

NEVER OPENWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Togi Makabe def. Tomohiro Ishii (champion) via pinfall. GRADE: A-

NEVER, if you’re wondering, stands for New Blood, Evolution, Valiantly, Eternal, and Radical. But what the acronym stands for and what the division actually is are two different things, as NJPW’s NEVER division shut down right as they crowned the first champion, and all of its champions have been established talent. Pretty much, it’s open to anybody, but the matches tend to favor big, bruising tanks. Togi Makabe is out first. He was once an IWGP Heavyweight Champion and winner of the G1 Climax, meaning he was one of the most talented wrestlers in the world, but now he prefers a brutal brawling style and goes by the name “Unchained Gorilla,” which is the best. Tomohiro Ishii is the “Stone Pitbull,” and this is a battle of the best nicknames in the world. He is stocky and thick and mean looking, three great things for a wrestler to be. Ishii’s shoulder is taped, as he separated it during the G1 Climax. He finished the tournament with a dead arm. Striker says that Ishii’s quest is to raise the status of the NEVER Openweight Championship, and defending it here would be a good way of doing that.

The bell rings and the two charge at one another, trading clotheslines and forearms. All of these are shrugged off, the initial salvos in a battle between two unsinkable ships. Makabe looks to run off the ropes for an advantage, but he is followed by Ishii, who hits him with a running forearm. Having staggered Makabe, Ishii runs off the ropes. He ducks a lariat and just runs into Makabe, who bounces off the ropes and runs into Makabe! The two exchange shoulder tackles, neither giving an inch. Makabe runs at Ishii one more time, but gets powerslammed! Off their feet for the first time, Makabe and Ishii get back to a standing base, and now it’s Makabe who powerslams the champion! They stagger each other with simultaneous clotheslines, and it looks like Ishii and Makabe are human after all. Ishii switches to chops now, Makabe favoring large overhand right hands. Ishii chops Makabe in the throat, and that puts the challenger down. Now that he has the high ground, Ishii headbutts his challenger. He follows with a second headbutt and a third, then just kicks at Makabe.

The Unchained Gorilla takes this as a sign of disrespect and gets back to his feet, challenging the champion to take his best shot. He withstands several of them and punches the Stone Pitbull into the corner. He hits two running lariats and an American 10-punch, the crowd counting along. Ross really likes Makabe, who is a devotee of Bruiser Brody. Ishii is less impressed though, as he slaps his challenger. They trade slaps, then progress to punches. These are heavy blows, uglier than hell, and I love them. He lands a Northern Lights Suplex, the first thing resembling a wrestling hold in this match, and gets a two count.

Undaunted, Makabe continues his offensive. Ishii is fading in the corner while Makabe lays in forearms. But that has a way of waking up gigantic monsters, and Ishii makes his way back to consciousness and lays into Makabe with a forearm of his own. With Makabe in the corner now, Ishii puts his challenger on the top turnbuckle and goes for a superplex. Ishii deadlifts Makabe and both men go crashing to the canvas. Ishii powerbombs Makabe and holds him for a pin, but Makabe kicks out. The two go into a big guy exchange where hitting one guy’s arm as they go for a lariat is enough to spin him around, and it’s Makabe who comes out of it with the advantage, finally hitting Ishii with a lariat. Makabe with a kneeling powerbomb now, which he holds for a pin, but Ishii is able to roll his shoulder up from the mat.

Makabe waistlocks Ishii, who tries to elbow his way out, but Makabe will not be denied and takes the champion over with a German suplex. That’s a two. The replay shows that Makabe shifted Ishii so that he would land on his injured shoulder, which is the kind of subtlety you don’t often see in wrestling. Makabe is in complete control now, whipping Ishii into the turnbuckles and following him in with a clothesline to the back of the head. He seats Ishii on the top rope and goes for a German suplex from there, but Ishii’s elbows work this time and he turns around and tries to headbutt Makabe off. It almost works, but Makabe’s leg strength is too much—he does a hanging sit-up back to the turnbuckle and takes a big swing at the champion, stunning him. Using the middle rope as his base, Makabe puts Ishii on his shoulders and brings him down with an ugly Samoan drop. Ross seems legitimately surprised that Ishii kicked out.

Ishii might still be in the match, but just barely. Makabe lariats him so hard that the champion spits, and Striker, who usually giggles at this kind of thing, lets out a stunned “Oh” instead. Makabe does it again, waking up the monster. Ishii goes for an enziguri, but Makabe easily blocks it. He follows up with a straight murderous lariat, but Ishii kicks out at one! Matt Striker calls it a “lariato” again and makes plans to snuggle with his body pillow after the show. The referee checks on Ishii, who is conscious, but just barely. Makabe goes for a clothesline, but Ishii ducks and hits a release German suplex. Makabe is up first and charges the champion, but is clotheslined down! Makabe goes into the lateral press immediately but only gets a one count. Matt Striker wants Jim Ross to scream “Lariato” now, because there’s nothing better than western men making fun of the way the Japanese pronounce English words. Ross laughs uncomfortably, then says the word with disdain because he wants to enjoy this match without some asshole demanding he be cute.

Back to their feet, it’s looking like Makabe is the fresher man, but they meet once again with a pair of clotheslines that could fell a tree, and neither man has an edge. It’s a clothesline battle for a hot moment, then Makabe starts chopping Ishii’s shoulder, which Ishii replies to with a brutal headbutt. Makabe sits up and eats a sliding lariat from Ishii for a near fall. Ishii goes for a suplex, but Makabe counters into one of his own. Ishii slips it and hits the enziguri, aka the back brain kick. It’s an incredibly common move now, but when a gigantic man is performing it without all the fancy filigree, just a leap and a kick to the back of the head, it’s as dangerous as ever. Makabe falls to the canvas and Ishii jackknifes the legs for a pin, but Makabe kicks out. More clotheslines, this time with Makabe coming out ahead. He gets behind Ishii and locks the arms, taking his man over with a dragon suplex, but it’s not enough!

More forearms now, both men stopping to talk trash. Ross wishes he could speak Japanese, and I do, too. Ishii gets ahead on forearms and headbutts his challenger again. Makabe stumbles back, out on his feet, but when you’re out on your feet you’re dumb enough to respond to a headbutt with one of your own. He follows with a sledgehammer blow to Ishii’s taped shoulder. Ishii returns fire, but another Makabe sledgehammer puts him down. Ishii gets up and is immediately put down by another sledgehammer, but this time he gets a one count. Ishii makes it to his feet and is gifted an utterly disgusting clothesline. That’s a two count. Ishii doesn’t get up though, so Makabe goes to the top turnbuckle and drops a knee on the back of Ishii’s head, Bruiser Brody’s King Kong knee drop. The referee counts to three, and this one, mercifully, is over.

Giant dudes dishing out giant punishment. This has become a capital-T Thing for many pro wrestling fans over the past year or two, with plenty of chatter of an unofficial “Hoss Division” in the WWE ranks and a Hoss Division Championship in promotions like Absolute Intense Wrestling. If ever there was a hoss fight, though, this is it. Two impossible human beings surviving lethal strikes and suplexes, both men seemingly mirror images of each other, until something gave. Here it was Ishii, but considering that his shoulder (and his knee) were taped up, the fact that he survived as long as he did was a miracle. Makabe gets a cheap shot in on Ishii and flips off the heavens because that’s the kind of man he is. I want a rematch the moment Ishii isn’t hindered by an injury. I want a rematch now. I want a rematch every day.

IWGP JR. HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH: Kenny Omega def. Ryusuke Taguchi (Champion) via pinfall. GRADE: B

Kenny Omega is the “cleaner” of the Bullet Club, their big new recruit of 2014. Omega has been wrestling in Japan for a long time now, long enough that he is fluent in Japanese, but when he signed with NJPW and joined the Bullet Club, he refused to speak anything but English, which is a great heel move. Jim Ross compares Omega to Brian Pillman, which, coming from Jim Ross, is very, very high praise. Omega is followed to the ring by his Bullet Club buddies, and he’s doing the Scott Hall toothpick routine. Matt Striker says that Omega swerved the fans and Jim Ross says that he doesn’t know what “swerve” means because he is my hero. Ryusuke Taguchi, the Funky Weapon, was Fergal Devitt’s tag team partner until Devitt turned on him and formed the Bullet Club, who he has been fighting ever since. Omega doesn’t look impressed with the funkiness of Taguchi’s weapon at all. Omega completes the Scott Hall toothpick routine by throwing it in the referee’s face, and we’re off.

Omega and Taguchi wrestle into the ropes and Omega breaks, slapping the champion lightly and giving him a John Cena A-OK sign. They tie up again and Taguchi backs Omega into the corner and disrespects him coming out of the ropes. Omega doesn’t like this and slaps the Funky Weapon, who has his dander up now. The two exchange leapfrogs and drop downs until Taguchi gets the advantage and sends Omega over with an armdrag. Omega is up first and runs off the ropes, but Taguchi meets him with a leaping hip check and gets funky, utilizing it a few more times on a seated Omega. Taguchi rams Omega into the turnbuckle. He sends him across the ring and pursues, but Omega does an impossible leap over Taguchi and rolls out of the corner. Omega comes back and goes for a hurricanrana, but Taguchi catches him in an ankle lock and drags him to the center of the ring!

Omega rolls over and kicks out of the ankle lock, but gets taken over with another armdrag. Taguchi with a nice back elbow sends Omega into the ropes and clotheslines him over. The Young Bucks get involved, distracting the referee, which allows Kenny Omega to grab a can of cold spray from under the ring. Taguchi goes to deal with Omega and gets sprayed right in the eyes. Omega sprays himself down with the stuff like a frat bro overapplying AXE and gets back into the ring. Omega is completely in control, chopping Taguchi into the corner, then charging in at incredible speed and crushing the champion in the corner. Two count. Taguchi is still blind, and Omega is still in control, fighting dirty and choking Taguchi in the corner. Omega goes for a suplex on Taguchi, who tries to fight his way out. Omega, however, is strong enough to keep Taguchi in the air to finish the suplex. Omega wanders around the ring wasting time, pulling an invisible chainsaw and making “VRIMMMM-NIM-NIM-NIM” noises. This is a dude WWE let slip through their goddamn fingers. Chainsaw fully revved up, he proceeds to rake his forearm over the eyes and forehead of the champion. Striker says that Omega shaved his arms a few days ago and that he has stubble growing in so that the move, already illegal, is more annoying, which is a good bit of psychology.

The referee pulls Omega off of Taguchi and gets shoved for doing his job. Taguchi is still not at 100% after the cold spray attack, but he ducks an Omega leaping roundhouse and gets his leg grabbed by the Young Bucks at ringside. Ross can’t fathom why the referee doesn’t do something about it, which is a pretty good point I guess, but man is he belaboring it. Omega runs at Taguchi, who is able to backdrop the champion over the ropes and onto his cohort. With the Bullet Clubon the floor, Taguchi executes a beautiful tope con hilo. He gets Omega back in the ring and hits a springboard missile dropkick for two. Taguchi gets Omega up and hits two suplexes in sequence, but before he can do a third, Omega knees him on top of the head and starts to slap him on the back of the neck. Omega grabs the waistlock, but Taguchi executes a go behind. Omega escapes with some elbows to the head and runs at Taguchi, using his blistering speed to redirect himself and confuse the champion before kicking out his knee. Omega leapfrogs into a facecrusher, executes a lazy pin, and gets a two count.

Omega continues to wear out his opponent with chops and stomps, then goes for a running Liger bomb. But Taguchi counters this, using a hurricanrana to send Omega hurtling into the turnbuckles. Taguchi with a sit out powerbomb of his own, but he can’t get much pressure on the pin attempt and gets a two. Taguchi goes up the turnbuckles but is met by Omega. The challenger falls off, but the champion isn’t quich enough to capitalize. Omega is punched off again and Taguchi leaps off, only to be dropkicked on the chin. Omega deadlifts Taguchi into a gutwrench powerbomb and gets a two. Now he picks Taguchi up onto his shoulder, but the champion gets out and tries for a tiger suplex. Omega rolls through and gets a two count. Omega gets up and turns into a knee to the jaw. Taguchi chickenwings the arms and lifts Omega, drives him down into a facebuster, and Omega kicks out!

Taguchi returns to the ankle lock, but the Bucks get involved again. It’s to no avail though, as Taguchi moves out of an Omega flying knee and hits a tiger lungblower. Omega somehow kicks out. The Funky Weapon feels that he has the match in hand and tries to lift Omega. Omega fights out of a torture rack and catches the champion trying another hip check, snapping him down with his trademark brutal German suplex. Omega follows with a running knee drive, puts Taguchi into electric chair position, then drives Taguchi to the mat with the One Winged Angel. Three seconds later, we have a new champion.

Ross compared Omega to Brian Pillman early on, and that comparison may be apt. I’m so far behind on NJPW that I haven’t seen much of his work in Bullet Club, but he wrestles with an incredibly weird charisma in this heel persona, staggering around in an imitation of drunken boxing. It’s the charisma of Pillman’s Loose Cannon persona with the talent of his early days as Flyin’ Bryan. Omega is already a great wrestler, but if he stays healthy, he might just become a legend.

IWGP TAG TEAM CHAMPIONSHIP:Meiyu Tag (Hiroki Goto and Katsuyori Shibata) def. Bullet Club (Karl Anderson and Doc Gallows, champions) via pinfall. GRADE: B

Bullet Club have been champions for one full revolution around the sun. Meiyu Tag, however, have a non-title victory over Gallows and Anderson, so the Americans are looking vulnerable going into this contest. Jim Ross loves that the champions come to the ring last. Gallows has his face painted and reminds Ross of gaijin bruisers like Stan Hansen and Terry Gordy. Karl Anderson reminds Jim Ross of Arn Anderson, which is amazing. Matt Striker is really into Amber O’Neil, and I hope the second time he says the phrase “Bullet Babe” is his last. Striker calls Gallows a “good bruther” because he listens to Colt Cabana’s podcast. Meiyu Tag wait around while the Bullet Club two sweet each other, and it’s former partners Anderson and Goto who start things off.

Goto gains the advantage by outwrestling and outslugging Anderson, but he is kicked in the back by Gallows and the champions take over. Anderson runs off the ropes, and Shibata takes a page out of the Bullet Club handbook, catching Anderson in a sleeper hold. He transitions to holding Anderson for his partner, but Machine Gun is able to get out of the way and Goto clotheslines Shibata off the apron. He turns around into a huge superkick from Doc Gallows, who is in the ring illegally. Bullet Club take over, Anderson with a Senton and Gallows with a leg drop. That gets a two count. Anderson gets another two count off of a leg lariat. A series of near falls, actually, as he won’t let go of the cover. He tags Doc Gallows in, and the mood changes with the entry of the big brawler.

Jim Ross doesn’t know anything about the Bullet Babe, but suspects that “she’ll earn her money tonight.” Gallows hammers away at Goto in the corner. Goto tries to lift Gallows but can’t, so they exchange clotheslines until Goto’s speed advantage allows him to take Gallows off his feet with one. Goto rolls over and tags in his partner. Shiabata enters the ring, kicks Anderson off the apron, and gets leveled by a Gallows forearm. Undeterred, Shiabata returns to his feet and soon has Gallows grounded in the corner, grinding away at him with repeated forearm shots. Shiabata creates some separation so he can charge at the huge American, but Gallows is back up and catches his challenger with a huge lariat, swallowing Shiabata’s head whole and taking him down to the canvas. Gallows whips Shiabata into the ropes, misses with a clothesline, and gets dropkicked. Anderson runs in and finds himself in an octopus stretch, but that leaves Shiabata open to an attack by Doc Gallows, who clubs him in the back. All four men are in the ring now, and the referee is just letting things happen. Meiyu Tag finally take control of the match with a pair of seated dropkicks to Gallows and Anderson. They hit Gallows with a double back suplex and get a two count.

They try to continue the double teaming, but Anderson cuts Goto off and Bullet Club begin abusing Shibata. A backbreaker/elbow drop combination that looks particularly nasty gets the pair a two count before Goto reenters the ring to break up the fall. Gallows picks Goto up and Anderson kicks him in the head before Gallows spins him out to the mat. A double team cutter gets Bullet Club another two, but Shiabata will not be denied. Meiyu Tag get Gallows out of the ring, and Goto and Anderson deny each other their finishers until Goto gets Gallows to the mat, where Shibata drills him with a penalty kick. They don’t see Gallows coming, though, and are double clotheslined. Shibata eats a chokebomb, but gets his shoulder up at two. Bodyslam from Gallows, who goes up top. Big dudes don’t belong up there, though, and Meiyu Tag recover in time to double up on him, slamming him to the mat. Gallows breaks up a double team and goes for his chokebomb on Goto, but Goto denies him with a headbutt. Shibata holds Gallows, Goto clotheslines, him, and Gallows falls back into a Shibata sleeper hold. He lets go to take care of Anderson, who is trying to get back into the ring, and Goto brings Gallows to his feet. Goto lifts the massive frame of Doc Gallows and tosses him to his partner, who kicks him. With Gallows stunned, Shiabata takes his head off with another penalty kick, and we’ve got new tag team champions.

Good tag team match, with the two childhood friends overcoming the American interlopers. New Japan, beyond the Junior Heavyweight Division, seems to have Bullet Club completely under control at this point, having wrested all but one championship away from the stable. But the big boss of Bullet Club is still out there, and he happens to be next.

AJ Styles def. Tetsuya Naito via pinfall. GRADE: A-

I do not like AJ Styles. I never have and suspect I never will, but I also have gone out of my way to avoid his New Japan stuff after years of annoyance at his tendency to fill matches with unnecessary spots, so all I really know about him is that his Styles Clash finisher has broken a neck or two in Japan but he still uses it, which is dangerous and unsafe but is now part of his gimmick. I’ve heard a lot of good things about his run in Japan from plenty of folks whose opinion I trust and respect, so I’ve got as open a mind as is possible, given 10 years of distaste. Speaking of time, Striker says that the Styles Clash is “quickly” becoming feared and respected, though that has been AJ’s finish, oh, for as long as he’s been somebody worth paying attention to. Sure, it just recently broke two necks with the move, but when most of your major wins have come via the move, it’s already feared and respected. Styles is a member of Bullet Club, the true replacement for Devitt. Striker is still going on about this Westernization thing, which I don’t get. Tetsuya Naito comes out in an absolutely amazing ring jacket. He is the “Stardust Genius,” which, no offense to STONE PITBULL or UNCHAINED GORILLA, is my pick for best nickname in wrestling.

AJ Styles is on Naito before the bell rings, going for the Styles Clash early. Naito counters out, and we’ve got ourselves a brawl. Styles goes for it again, but Naito picks the former IWGP Champion up and puts him on the apron. He runs after Styles, who back body drops him over the ropes. AJ Styles goes for a moonsault press off the ring apron, but Naito moves and Styles lands on his feet. Naito scores with an elbow, climbs onto an apron, and lands a running dropkick, the first high impact move of the match. Naito continues to go with the dropkick until Styles interrupts a corner combination by grabbing Naito’s leg and snapping it over his shoulder. Styles continues to work the leg, elbow dropping Naito several times and dropping his knee on it. Styles lets Naito back to his feet, only to kick the leg out from under him. Back on the canvas, Styles locks Naito in a deathlock variation. The submission gives Striker and Ross some time to talk about Styles as the greatest thing TNA developed, which is actually true, and for Striker to claim that this is a boom period in wrestling, which is not. There’s a lot of choice in wrestling if you’re an American fan who knows that there’s a world beyond the WWE’s main roster, but New Japan is likely one of the only promotions in the world that’s actually enjoying a period of sustained creative and financial success, and there’s no such thing as a one promotion boom. Ross says that it would be cool to see one of these men as a surprise entrant in the Royal Rumble, and now I’m less into the “wrestling as a global form of entertainment” thing than I was two hours ago.

Styles scores with a tornado DDT on Naito, who may be the least likely to enter the Royal Rumble, but Naito gets up and fights back, taking Styles over with a biiiiig hip toss, which he follows with a dropkick and a senton. Styles tries to kick at a charging Naito in the corner, but Naito catches Styles’ legs and swings them through the ropes, catching a compromised Styles with a hanging neckbreaker. That gets a two count, and Naito tries to work some feeling into his knees. He puts Styles on the top rope and follows him up. Styles puts him off with a few headbutts, which allows AJ to eventually land a springboard forearm. A series of suplex attempts leads to Styles hitting Naito with a gross-looking neckbreaker, which Naito kicks out of it. Styles goes for a German suplex and nails it. He goes for another, but Naito rolls through and gets a two count. He hits a German suplex of his own and scores another near fall.

Styles lands a combination of strikes but misses the killing blow, allowing Naito to land an enziguri. Styles reverses an Irish Whip, but Naito uses the momentum to land a leaping forearm shot. He goes to the top rope for his Stardust Press but takes too long to find his footing, allowing AJ to get back into it by taking out Naito’s legs. Styles goes for a back suplex off the top rope, but Naito flips out and tries to land on his feet. That doesn’t quite work, as his leg is injured, but Styles took the worst of that fall. Naito charges at Styles, who rolls through and locks in his calf killer submission. Naito scrambles, looking for the ropes, but the calf killer takes away half of his body, and his leg is already weak. Styles moves his hands up to the toe of Naito’s boot so he can exert more pressure, which is fantastic, and reaches back with one to swat Naito’s arm away from the ropes, which is also a really, really good psychological touch. Naito pushes back on his leg, trying to find some relief, looks to smother Styles with his arm, does everything he can. He presses up and looks ready to tap out, but that gives him enough space to dive for the ropes, which he makes. Tremendous submission sequence, but that leg is done and most of Naito’s offense is gone with it.

Styles picks the leg, and Naito fights him off. Styles picks it again and gets enziguried for going back to the well, then Naito takes him over with a uranage suplex. Naito waistlocks Styles back to his feet, maybe for a German suplex, but Styles has more energy and breaks the hold, only for Naito to go under his arms and carry his opponent over with a dragon suplex! That’s a two count. Naito gets Styles in a pumphandle, but AJ muscles out of it and lands a glancing blow with his Pele Kick. Styles hits a double-underhook impaler DDT, the Bloody Sunday, which belonged to former Bullet Club leader Fergal Devitt, and Naito is out. Styles signals for the Styles Clash, but Naito counters by back dropping Styles up and falling back until Styles flies out of the ring to the floor. Styles is back in at 19, giving Naito some time to recover. Naito just kinda wanders back into the corner, where Styles uses the tights to ram his opponent into the turnbuckle. From there, though, Naito trips the leader of the Bullet Club and lands the swinging dropkick that got him in trouble in the opening moments of the match. Naito goes for a hurricanrana off the top rope, but Styles catches him. Naito is in perfect position for AJ Styles to set up for the Styles Clash, which he lands from the second rope, and ain’t nobody getting up from that.

Very smartly worked contest that leads me to believe Styles has gotten much better since the glory days of the X Division, where he got insane praise for matches where he was breaking up chokeholds with stupid springboard 720 splashes. The best wrestlers in the world do get smarter as they get older, and if you’ve got a lot of talent and aren’t trading in on WWE fame (which Styles isn’t), going to a place like New Japan and working all of the top guys will make you that much better. Striker and Ross made a big deal out of Naito’s inability to win a match at Wrestle Kingdom, as this was his fourth attempt and fourth loss. But he wrestled so much of this match on a gimpy leg and was only put away with a super-version of a move that legit has a reputation as one of the most dangerous in wrestling, so he’s going to be fine.

IWGP INTERCONTINENTAL CHAMPIONSHIP: Shinsuke Nakamura (champion) def. Kota Ibushi via pinfall. GRADE: A+

For most American fans, this here is the one. Nakamura has a cult following among American fans who follow Japanese wrestling, as does Kota Ibushi. Their feud, documented in the pre-match promotional video, has been lengthy and intense. Though they’re around the same age, Ibushi’s road to New Japan Pro Wrestling was hard and long, and he’s still pretty much a rookie in the promotion compared to Nakamura, who has been here for some time and, along with Tanahashi and Okada, is one of NJPW’s ace wrestlers. A win over Nakamura at a Dome show puts Ibushi right up there with them, as the “Golden Star” quickly graduated from the Jr. Heavyweight ranks due to his unrivaled popularity within that division. To beat Nakamura, though, he’s going to have to bring something extra to the table, proving that he’s not the supremely talented guy who goofed around fighting blow-up dolls on the indies. He returns to the scene of his greatest triumph, Wrestle Kingdom, where in 2014 he defeated Fergal Devitt for the Jr. Heavyweight Championship. He’s out first, leaping out from beneath the stage like Rey Mysterio Jr. Nakamura comes out in a crown and a robe, because he is the King of Strong Style. Ross talks about how he loves Michael Jackson and Freddie Mercury, but is still a badass. This entrance really sells that point, man. It is something.

The two begin by circling each other, each man testing the other with hard kicks to the legs. Nakamura eventually closes in on Ibushi, getting a waistlock. He backs Ibushi into the ropes and breaks clean, but Ibushi slaps him on the back of the head. Nakamura shoots in with a knee and whips Ibushi into the ropes, but Ibushi reverses. Nakamura grabs the ropes, putting the breaks on, and manages to avoid Ibushi’s attempted dropkick. Ibushi crashes to the canvas but avoids a stomp. He’s back to his feet already, kicking again at Nakamura’s legs. He blocks two of Nakamura’s knee strikes, and the two back off into opposing corners. Jim Ross talks about how children have Shinsuke Nakamura’s haircut. Nobody has Kota Ibushi’s, because, as my friend Robert Newsome frequently points out, he has your Aunt Diane’s hairstyle. Nakamura offers his hand to Ibushi as a show of respect and Ibushi foolishly takes it, opening himself up to a short-arm knee strike, followed by an axe kick. Nakamura goes for the BomaYe early but Ibushi is too fast and avoids it, following with a dropkick to Nakamura’s shoulder.

In the corner, Ibushi lets loose with a few strikes before washing Nakamura’s face with his boot, which is a Nakamura signature. Shinsuke Nakamura looks none too impressed with this, while Kota Ibushi stands back, telling the champion to bring it. Nakamura gets up and invites Ibushi to take a running start, which he does. Nakamura lands a knee, then throws Ibushi into the turnbuckles, where he stomps a mudhole in the Golden Star. Nakamura bridges Ibushi across the top ropes in the corner and blasts his helpless foe with a running knee right to the ribs. Ibushi falls to the ring apron, where Nakamura follows with a pair of knee strikes, the first one running on the floor, the second leaping from the apron. Ibushi is dazed on the floor while the referee starts his 20 count, failing to get into the ring on his first try, but he’s in at eight. Nakamura takes control with the cravate, snapmaring Ibushi over before dropping another knee, this time to Ibushi’s forehead. Ibushi kicks out of a showy cover and sinks in a chinlock. Nakamura leverages that into several cradle attempts, but Ibushi kicks out of them all and makes his way to the ropes for a break.

Ibushi gets up and forearms Nakamura, who brushes it off. Ibushi goes for a second, and Nakamura brushes that off, too. This has Kota Ibushi mad, but his third forearm goes nowhere, and Nakamura cuts him off with a few forearms of his own. He bends Ibushi over and slaps him in the face until he crumbles to the mat, where he goes for a roundhouse kick and misses. Ibushi is back to his feet, firing slaps and chops of his own, and the two go nose to nose. Ibushi misses with a shot, and Nakamura capitalizes with a backstabber. Ibushi flips out of a back suplex, though, and takes Nakamura over with a Frankensteiner. Nakamura’s on the apron now, but is swiftly dropkicked off. Alone in the ring and with room to run, Ibushi leaps onto the turnbuckles and uses those to propel himself into a moonsault press to the floor, where Nakamura is standing! Ibushi rolls through and sticks the landing, because that’s how good he is. Ibushi rams Nakamura into the ring apron and sends him back into the ring, where he drills Nakamura with a springboard dropkick. His German suplex is dropped, but Ibushi is too fast for Nakamura on this exchange, hitting him with slaps and kicks, finishing with a hard roundhouse kick to the sternum. Ibushi’s standing shooting star press nets him a near fall.

Nakamura makes his way to the corner, where he’s able to back drop Ibushi to the apron. He goes to suplex Ibushi in, but is kneed in the top of the head. Nakamura staggers away, allowing Ibushi to springbord into the ring, but Nakamura catches him with a one-legged dropkick to the chin. Ibushi gets to his feet and ducks one kick, but Nakamura keeps his momentum going and lands another to Ibushi’s jaw. He takes Ibushi down with a classic front suplex and moves immediately into a succession of knee strikes. Ibushi is making his return from a concussion, so knees to the head is the way to go. Nakamura charges in for the BomaYe, but Ibushi sidesteps it and the champion rushes headlong into the turnbuckles. Ibushi an’t take advantage right away, but Nakamura tries going upstairs, where the challenger stops him with a slap to the chest. Nakamura fights Ibushi off, sending him to the ring apron. Ibushi gets a shot in, stunning Nakamura, and this lets Ibushi connect with a springboard hurricanrana off the top turnbuckle! He scrambles over for the cover, hooks the leg, and only gets two.

Ibushi gets Nakamura in a full nelson, looking for a dragon suplex, but Nakamura breaks it. He looks for an elbow, but Ibushi sees it coming and scores with a quick-release dragon suplex, dumping Nakamura on his head. He misses a kick, but lands a standing corkscrew splash, and that’s a two count, too. Ibushi looks to crank up the nastiness a bit, going for a piledriver, but Nakamura has his leg and hangs on for dear life. So Ibushi kicks him in the head and goes for it again, only this time Nakamura’s counter is a back body drop. Ibushi hangs on to the waistlock and is able to roll through with a sunset flip, scoring another near fall. He scores with a roundhouse kick to the back of Nakamura’s skull as both men get to their feet and follows that with a sit-out super powerbomb. He has both of Nakamura’s legs locked, but the champion is able to kick out because Ibushi gets confident and starts counting along with the referee! Ibushi goes for his Phoenix Splash but Nakamura moves and he eats the canvas. Nakamura follows up with the BomaYe, right to the back of Ibushi’s head! He’s still dazed from the powerbomb, however, and can’t follow up with an attempt at a pinfall, so with Ibushi trying to use the ropes to get back to his feet, Nakamura gets up and starts stomping away at the challenger, kicking him hard on the back of his head and to the side of the face, but Ibushi is smiling as the referee drags the champion off!

He turns around and drills Nakamura with a few palm strikes, transitioning quickly into just straight up punches, which are rare and indicative of true hatred. The referee gets between the two to admonish Ibushi, and Nakamura shoves the official, charging in and destroying Ibushi with a straight fist of his own. Ibushi ducks another one and goes for a shot of his own, but Nakamura catches the ball of Ibushi’s fist and uses the challenger’s momentum to carry them both through into a cross armbreaker! Ibushi is able to lock his hands, though, stands, and gets out of the hold by kicking Nakamura right in the goddamn face. Nakamura is down on the canvas, and Ibushi continues to kick him, hard and mean. He’s wrestling like a prick, and it is wonderful. He brings Nakamura up and takes him over with a dirty half and half suplex. He crushes Nakamura with a BomaYe, but that only gets a one count! Ibushi doesn’t sit around and wonder what it’s going to take, oh no. He gets up and starts punching Nakamura in the back of the head. This is a completely new look for Nakamura, this grit and intensity when his pretty flips and strikes aren’t getting it done, and I like it a lot. Nakamura wakes up a bit, though, and push-kicks Ibushi away, into the turnbuckles. Now it’s Nakamura with the ugly kicks and stomps, Ibushi literally tasting leather at one point, as his tongue is out and Nakamura grinds the toe of his boot into it.

The two are back to their feet, trading brutal-sounding strikes. Nakamura gains the advantage temporarily and tries to make something out of it, running off the ropes, but Ibushi hits him with a double stomp, taking the champion down! Double stomps are becoming so common it’s hard to care about them, but this one was really, really beautiful, and Nakamura’s facial expression really goes a long way in selling the effectiveness of the move. Both men are winded, having wrestled at a breakneck pace for awhile now, but Ibushi has Nakamura dead to rights. He lifts the wounded champion up on the apron, leaps onto the top rope, and brings him back into the ring with a dragon suplex from the top rope! It’s hideous and breathtaking at the same time, and again Ibushi’s celebrating the count as it happens is what allows Nakamura to kick out. Ibushi knows he still has the match in hand, though, so he reasserts his control, going for another powerbomb. Nakamura headbuts his way out of it though, and captures Ibushi, elbowing the bejesus out of him before hitting a BomaYe from the second turnbuckle! But Ibushi is back up! The two charge at each other, but they have the same idea, kicking each other in the leg. Ibushi recovers first, but Nakamura sees him coming, lifts him into a fireman’s carry, then drives him down to the mat. Ibushi stands, and Nakamura kills him with another BomaYe knee. This one is too much for Ibushi to recover from, however, and the referee counts to three.

This is it. This is the best wrestling match of the year, and it took place four days into it. WWE may match or equal it in terms of pomp and circumstance at WrestleMania and put on one of its classic sports entertainment contests in front of a larger, international crowd, but this was a beautifully wrestled contest, a perfect merger of two unique, inscrutable styles. If you like New Japan and have Shinsuke Nakamura as the best wrestler in the world, Kota Ibushi has to be your second best after this. If you’ve been following Ibushi’s career and have a soft spot for the guy, then Nakamura is right up there with him. This isn’t Ibushi’s crowning moment, he didn’t go home with the Intercontinental Championship, but he is undeniably a star after this match, one of the biggest NJPW has, which makes him one of the most important professional wrestlers in the world. Nakamura celebrates with his championship while Matt Striker marks out like an adult trying to act like a child, and Nakamura shows his challenger some respect, checking to see if he’s okay after the BomaYe and giving him a fist bump. One of the young boys at ringside puts the belt around Nakamura’s waist while Ibushi looks on, cradling his head. It’s a magnificent shot from the closing moments of a magnificent match:

Jim Ross spent some time in this match praising New Japan for managing to make each of their championships rank equally in terms of importance, and that truly is a unique accomplishment that few promotions have been able to do, let alone maintain. The NWA managed to do it for awhile in the 1980s, when the Four Horsemen held all the gold and each title was significant, and the WWF had a good thing going when the World and Intercontinental titles were all they had, but it was always very clear that the World Heavyweight Championship was the end goal that all aspired to. In New Japan, it’s arguable. The IWGP Heavyweight Championship has the weight of history behind it, but the Intercontinental Championship has Nakamura, the most popular wrestler in the country, and it has matches like this. It’s a young title, but one of the three most important championships in the world. This match further bolsters its reputation, and the reputation of the men who fought for it on this night. Nakamura calls Ibushi the best, which he may very well be, and Nakamura calls it a night. Jim Ross says that being able to call this match made it worthwhile to celebrate his birthday away from his family. He’s still the best in the world when it comes to conveying how important the spectacle of professional wrestling is, at least in my eyes.

IWGP HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP: Hiroshi Tanahashi (champion) def. Kazuchika Okada via pinfall. GRADE: A

I don’t have a translation of the promo video that played before this match, but the tone of this one is that Tanahashi is NJPW’s ace, and Okada his cocky usurper. Tanahashi hangs out with fans and high fives children while Okada stands in front of his mansion, wearing suits and feeling fine. Tanahashi lives for NJPW, Okada for himself. But they’re both very popular, so it’s all good. Okada comes out in a robe that’s half Savage, half Flair, and all man. He takes it off to reveal his usual rad duster. Tanahashi’s entrance promo claims that he is the Ace of the Universe, and so long as he’s the IWGP Heavyweight Champion, that’s true. Tanahashi plays air guitar down to the ring while Ross talks about Tanahashi’s credentials as a fan and a wrestler. Tanahashi is Mr. Tokyo Dome, having main evented the venue nine times. This is the seventh encounter between Tanahashi and Okada, with their matches being talked about in the same hushed tones as Ric Flair and Rickey Steamboat’s epic, decades-spanning rivalry. Ross mentions that, along with Brisco/Funk, Rock/Austin, and Michaels/Undertaker.

They tie up and begin by wrestling, Tanahashi outworking the other until Okada takes control of the arm. They exchange arm holds, but Tanahashi works Okada into a drop toe hold and grabs a side headlock. Okada slips it and grabs one of his own. Okada keeps it on for awhile, hitting a shoulder block with Tanahashi shoots him into the ropes. Okada shoots Tanahashi into the ropes and has his knee taken out from under him by the champion, who slides out of the ring and back in to regain control with another headlock. Ross loves Okada’s dropkick. He wants to see it. Tanahashi maintains the headlock until Okada shoots him into the ropes, then he gets the shoulder block. Tanahashi does a side headlock takeover, but Okada counters with a headscissors, and we’re at a stalemate.

Okada and Tanahashi wrestle each other into the corner now, exchanging positions because neither wants to be the man who needs a break. Finally, Okada makes like he is going to give Tanahashi a break, only to nail him with a forearm in the corner. Tanahashi fires back with a few of his own, and we’re in a slugfest, forearms and uppercuts, no punches thrown. Tanahashi bodyslams Okada and climbs to the middle rope, but Okada is up before Tanahashi can leap, hitting him with a sprinting uppercut that sends Tanahashi tumbling to the Tokyo Dome floor. Okada pursues the champion, kicking him over the guardrail that surrounds the ring. He then drags Okada over the railing and hits a hanging DDT. Okada stops the referee from continuing his count and starts taking Tanahashi out onto the Tokyo Dome ramp. He goes for a tombstone piledriver, but Tanahashi deadweights and refuses to go. He fights Okada off and hits him with a jawbreaker before air guitaring his way up the ramp. Nakamura sprints down the ramp at Okada, who lifts the champion up onto his shoulders and hits an Attitude Adjustment on the ramp. The difference between Okada and John Cena, though, is that The Rainmaker’s AA is snug and harsh-looking.

Okada gets Tanahashi back into the ring and hits him with a fast, low dropkick. Okada misses a leaping forearm smash in the corner but gets his boot up on an oncoming Tanahashi, bodyslams him, and misses a senton. Tanahashi lands some strikes, punctuated by a diving forearm off the ropes. He climbs to the middle turnbuckle and lands a somersault senton for two. Tanahashi springs off the ropes and gets flapjacked by his challenger. Tanahashi scores with a back elbow, though, and misses with a crossbody. Okada looks for a roll-up, but instead locks Tanahashi in a crucifix submission. The champion scoots forward and grabs the ropes to break the submission. Thus indisposed, however, Okada easily lands a slingshot senton over the ropes, and scores a near fall. Okada challenges Tanahashi to get back into things, but the champion’s forearms aren’t doing it. Okada’s, however, have their desired effect. Eventually, champion and challenger have each other by the hair, and Tanahashi takes over with an uppercut. Okada replies with a trio of uppercuts and tries to kick Tanahashi, who is telegraphing his back body drop, but Tanahashi traps the leg and slams his elbow down on the kneecap. Okada, however, still manages to level Tanahashi with a dropkick, sending the champion into the corner.

Okada goes for another fireman’s carry slam, but Tanahashi catches Okada’s neck and brings him down by it. That’s a two count. Okada puts Tanahashi on the top rope and struggles up the turnbuckles to meet him. The champion elbows his way off of Okada’s shoulders and knocks him off. Okada’s in position for the High Fly Flow frog splash, but Okada moves and drills Tanahashi with a driving uppercut as he’s trying to get back to his feet. That’s a two count. Okada picks Tanahashi up in another fireman’s carry and brings Tanahashi’s neck and shoulders down across his knee. Another near fall. Okada takes his time and executes a top rope elbow drop on Tanahashi, hitting his pose. The camera zooms waaaaaaaay out, and Okada goes for his Rainmaker lariat, but the champion counters into a roll up, getting a near fall. The two exchange counters, Tanahashi catching Okada’s boot and bringing it down, where he executes a dragon screw leg whip.

Tanahashi begins working the leg, as that, according to Striker, is where he gets the drive for his lariat. Good call. Tanahashi dropkicks the knee, and Jim Ross starts getting sad because he wants to see Okada’s drop kick. Okada sends Tanahashi into the guardrail and follows after him, but Tanahashi moves out of the way and the challenger takes a header over the railing and onto the concrete floor. Tanahashi climbs onto the top turnbuckle in the ring and considers his options, leaps, and lands a High Fly Flow (really more of a cross body since Okada is standing), clearing a lot of distance in the process!

Tanahashi struggles to get Okada back to the ring, but gets the job done. He climbs to the top rope and manages to avoid crashing and burning when Okada ducks him, and turns the Rainmaker lariat into his Slingblade, a set up for the High Fly Flow. He goes up top and hits it while Okada is standing, but the Rainmaker rolls through and stands with Takada gripped for the Tombstone, which is an amazing feat of strength and body control. Tanahashi reverses it in the classic style, flipping it over and going for one of his own, which he lands! It is a heavy, nasty tombstone from a dude who doesn’t use the move often, if ever, and thus looks particularly devastating. Rather than cover his man, Tanahashi ascends the turnbuckles once more and sticks the High Fly Flow on Okada’s back. He rolls Okada over and goes up top once more. He lands the move a second time, has Okada covered, but the challenger kicks out!

Ross can’t believe how many High Fly Flows Tanahashi has used in such a brief span, and, well, it is actually pretty unusual for a wrestler to use their finish as frequently as the IWGP Heavyweight Champion does. Tanahashi goes for the Texas Cloverleaf, but is kicked away by Okada. Tanahashi tries to regain control, but Okada fires back with an uppercut. Tanahashi gets one of his own in and lands another Slingblade before doing a Rainmaker pose of his own. Tanahashi goes for the Rainmaker lariat, but Okada ducks and rips Tanahashi back into his own Rainmaker, which lands the champion nastily on his head. Okada goes for the cover, but Tanahashi kicks out, which is something nobody, Tanahashi included, has done before.

Okada and Tanahashi struggle to their knees, where they begin exchanging forearms once more. They forearm each other back to a standing position, and Okada manages to get Tanahashi into tombstone position. The champion, however, has other plans, and scores with a roll-up. Okada kicks out, but just barely. Tanahashi catches Okada’s leg on a kick and dropkicks the one planted on the mat. Tanahashi starts slapping Okada, who falls to his knees. Tanahashi brings him back up and tries for another open hand strike, but Okada ducks and goes for the backslide. That gets a two count. Okada goes for another Rainmaker, but Tanahashi ducks and goes for a dragon suplex. Okada breaks the arms, though, only for Tanahashi to straightjacket them and take him over with a German suplex that nearly ends the contest.

Okada slips another attempt at the dragon suplex and hits a beautiful bridging German of his own for two. Tanahashi gets out of a second and hits his dragon suplex, but that doesn’t end it, either. Tanahashi goes off the ropes, but Okada hits his dropkick, which Ross calls like he just saw Jeff Hardy fall off a ladder. He is into this match, and, even after the brilliance of Ibushi/Nakamura, it is hard not to be right there with him. Okada misses another Rainmaker, and Tanahashi makes him pay with another dragon screw. Tanahashi does another one, this one over the ropes, and that’s going to take away the power of the Rainmaker for sure. Okada’s leg is limp and he’s having trouble getting it out of the ropes, so Tanahashi takes advantage, climbing the turnbuckles and landing an incredible High Fly Flow, sandwiching Okada into the mat! Hardly finished, Tanahashi hits the dragon screw from a fourth position and hits another High Fly Flow, this time while Okada is seated. Okada is out, done, and Tanahashi goes up top once more, turning his body mid-air for the High Fly Flow, his third in a row, and the one that ends it.

Both men are spent on the canvas, the Ace of the Universe and the Rainmaker. Okada put in one hell of an effort, but Tanahashi’s game plan was resplendent. Even if the dragon screws didn’t deter Okada from attempting the Rainmaker, they slowed the younger man down and enabled the champion to avoid him. Later, those dragon screws incapacitated Okada to the point that Tanahashi was able to land three High Fly Flows, each one more impressive than the last. Even if Okada had managed to kick out of the last one, Okada was done, a Texas Cloverleaf away from giving the match to Tanahash regardless of whatever grit he had left.

Tanahashi accepts his championship and raises his hand in victory. Okada, meanwhile, is led back to the locker room, openly weeping. Man. Even at the end this match’s story is compelling. Okada obviously has nothing to be ashamed of, but he came into this match as the slight favorite and was bested. Tanahashi tells the 27-year-old challenger that he wasn’t ready to be New Japan’s ace yet, which is some salt in the wounds for sure. Tanahashi closes the show by playing air guitar, because that’s his Hogan pose, and Hogan always closes with a pose, brother.

Overall, this was an incredible wrestling event, featuring something for everybody. . As far as the presentation goes, this was just the regular New Japan feed with different commentary. Matt Striker, when he wasn’t trying too hard to be an über-fan, was great, though his tendency to shout out podcasts and t-shirts and shamelessly drop insider terms for no reason irked the hell out of me. Everybody’s mileage varies on the guy, and if he’s the color commentator on NJPW’s eventual American TV show, it’s not like I’m going to skip watching it because he’s on commentary. Jim Ross knows his shortcomings when it comes to pronunciation of Japanese names and is forthcoming about them, and if he seems “off,” then it’s because he’s less shouty here than he was late in his WWE tenure. I thought he did a tremendous job, particularly during the biggest matches of the night, where his reverence for the performers and their skills felt genuine, which I suspect it was. I love the old guy and his foibles, agree with a lot of his takes on the tiny, presentational aspects of the game, and don’t mind that he doesn’t think Freddie Mercury was a badass. If the company feels the need to go with a big, “name” announce team, there probably aren’t many out there who can top this one. Announcing is something of a lost art in wrestling, so it’s good to have a guy like Jim Ross out there, still practicing it.

There are, I think, four matches worth going out of your way to see from this card, and perhaps two more depending on how much you like Kenny Omega and/or the work-shoot style of pro wrestling. That is a lot of great wrestling stretched out over four hours, and whether you’re seeing New Japan through a service like Jeff Jarrett’s Global Force Wrestling or through NJPWWorld, this event appears to be the ground floor for a promotion that currently knows no ceiling, whose roster is at an artistic peak, and whose audience continues to expand.

January 6, 2015