In all honesty, I thought the show was great. It turned into something very good from a card that on paper looked a bit lackluster, but on the whole, I believe it was worth every penny I spent on it to watch live.
Let's begin, shall we?
Money in the Bank Ladder Match
Very, very closely contested for the spot of best MITB match ever with the inaugural match. Some fantastic spots here that made me want to watch the match twice just to get them all again - Finlay hitting a suicide dive sticks out as just awesome. Shelton's top of the ladder jump, the Unprettier from the scaffold, hell, even the World's Strongest Slam on the ladder was sick and earned Henry his spot in the match. A sick spotfest that had excellent flow, got the crowd energized, and had a very surprising winner. It was no one we were suspecting, but I've got the sneaking suspicion the case is being held onto for someone else. Perhaps Kennedy. Then again, maybe Punk will blindside Triple H tonight and steal the WWE Championship. Who knows? This is what I love about the MITB concept - as long as the case is out there, you never know where it when it'll happen, just that it will. Overall, the match was an excellent opener and I give it a solid 8/10.
25 Divas Battle Royal
Alright, to everyone who's bitching about this, listen up. The Divas exist for two reason: to look hot and to fill space. I defy you to tell me this match didn't live up to both of those requirements. 24 hot women and a man in drag occupied 7 minutes of the card that basically just filled up the space. I will say this though - the Kidd Rock concert was atrocious. We didn't need a bloody concert, here - he sang the better part of 5 songs here, and it had to be, I don't know, 12 or 13 minutes or better. Twice as long as the battle royal. If he had just came out and sang "So Hott" for 3 minutes, we could have put the tag title match on this card. Just sad. It seemed to me that it was some sort of attempt to look like the Superbowl, with their halftime show - but if so, why kill the crowd at the beginning of the show with this? Ugh. I would have preferred him being Master of Ceremonies for this thing like Snoop last year, perhaps having him come out singing So Hott or something. Waste of time. But anyway, the match was great filler filled with hotness, and as always Santino is comedic gold as he knows begins a run in drag and probably a women's title reign before his inevitable release. I give the battle royal itself a 6/10.
3 on 1 Handicap Match: Legends vs Jericho
A surprisingly great match here, honestly. Snuka looked the worst, but let's be fair to him - he was 10 years older than his partners here, and accordingly was given the least amount of time. Piper came off pretty well, and he used the crowd to make up for his age, which went off well. But Steamboat was just great. He barely looked like he was 56 and coming out of retirement. He hit a crossbody and plancha, even! Fantastic performance that makes me wonder if Steamboat vs Jericho one on one might not have made a really fantastic match here. The post match segment marked another big problem the WWE was having throughout the night, though - letting the crowd get cold. You can't overload them, obviously, but consistently throughout the night the booking just let the crowd fade. The Kidd Rock concert was the first instance, and then this. Rourke took way too long. I mean, really now. I get you have to sell it, but Rourke should have been flaming angry at the end of the match and practically vaulted over the wall. Instead he was just "Yeah, okay, my four new buddies got their asses kicked...alright..." And took an age to get into the ring. The little boxing thing was just sad until the knockout punch, which mercifully ended it. Overall, it could have happened faster and probably met more success, as the crowd would have been hot for a bigger pop. Still, though, the match warrants a 7/10.
Extreme Rules
This is a great example of the problems that plagued WrestleMania. The beginning of the match was great - constant action, lots of fun weapons, etc., etc. It was high impact, fast action. Toward the end, though, it was jittery - start, stop. Spot, lie down. The spots were excellent, certainly, but they weren't filled properly in between. It's why a guy like Jeff could really use a kip up type maneuver, so he can hit a big spot, and then come back to get it going. Still, the table spot was great, and the Twist of Fate with a chair was very, very nice. So glad to see Matt win in an echo of Owen vs Bret, and potentially this could be Matt's rise to the big one. Overall, the match warrants a 7/10 from me.
Intercontinental Championship
Okay, first off. What the fuck, Mysterio? I'm an unabashed fan of Rey, but who the fuck dressed him like this? Why? What did the Joker have to do with fuck ALL! No one cares about Heath Ledger, if that's what they were after. Really, no one but teenage girls and do you think they're really watching WrestleMania in mass numbers? Christ, what a piss poor idea. But alright, we're moving on. He looked a little better with the hair off. I was really laughing out loud for the whole thing, but I don't know why. I guess because Mysterio was so ludicrous, and the ridiculously short match was just funny. It sounds like I'm pretty negative on it right now, but I'm not entirely. I walked away from this match with a huge respect for JBL. He came out like a huge heel, jobbed out to Mysterio in huge fashion for his last match, and then quit as nothing but a heel. He left with no glory, being booed all the way, and I respect that a lot. The segment was entertaining, and JBL's retirement was perfect for his character, so I give this segment a 6/10.
The Undertaker vs Shawn Michaels
Do I really need to talk about this? It was fantastic, really. Not the greatest match of all time, certainly not, but I would go so far as to say it's HBK and Taker's best confrontation. The finisher kick outs were done a lot, but damn they were epic - I honestly jumped out of my seat when HBK kicked out of the Tombstone with a WTF. The Undertaker suicide dive was brilliant, and I was honestly concerned he had hurt himself. The return to the ring was wonderful - it had me, at least, wondering if the streak was really about to end via countout. A lot of laying around at points, which sort of brought it down, but hey - they're older, and it was a half hour match. They needed a few moments to rest, and since both of them have kip ups, it made the end of some of these segments turn into huge pops. Overall, a fantastic match, the show stealer, huge excitement, huge hype, energy at every nearfall - a certain 10/10.
Triple Threat
I think this was the biggest surprise of the night, because it was great. It was nonstop action with a lot of big moments, but it flowed from start to finish. The great thing about Triple Threats is that you can hit a huge power move that would normally stop the match for a minute while someone recovers, but with the set up, you can hit that move, they roll out of the ring, and the other two guys work together. You saw a lot of that done, and done really well. The finish was just great - lifting Big Show and Edge - before the double FUs (the hell with your PG name changing, I say!) and Cena winning the title again. Really, a wonderful, wonderful match, the better of the two titles matches, and perhaps more deserving to be the proper main event. 9/10.
Main Event
You know, I don't really think it was atrocious, but it was far from good. It was, well...it was average. It seems more like this was a non title match that should have happened before Undertaker vs Shawn. Being in the main event, this should at least live up to the two matches before it, and it didn't. It's spot hurt it's quality, and the whole thing was just...meh. There was nothing very exciting about it. Shawn vs Taker had every nearfall hanging on, and so did the Triple Threat, but there was just none of that in this match. It certainly didn't live up to its hype. I'm not normally one to bash Triple H for going over in big matches, but really...I don't know what to say here. Orton was on fire. He won the Rumble. He assassinated the McMahon family. He was about to finish off the last of them, and Triple H pins him in completely anticlimactic fashion. The crowd responded pretty weakly to it, and it was just...sad. Once again, look to the last two matches finish - Undertaker hit the Tombstone after an exciting sequence when he pulled him back in, and Cena hit the double FUs. Triple H's Pedigree was...just another Pedigree. No Mania moment. No great memory. Just a Pedigree, the same he's hit on every random jobber for years. Hell, Triple H could have won this match and made it exciting, but he didn't. I don't know if this is a case of Triple H burying, but it's still a horrible decision any way you spin it - had Orton gone over by any means, with an exciting RKO, it would have been a match for the ages. Instead, Triple H wins and the match will always be overshadowed by what came before. I sincerely hope that Orton defeats Triple H in the Backlash rematch, or else something crazy happens - maybe CM Punk cashed in against Triple H, wins the title, and they do Orton vs CM Punk properly. I don't know, but I'm confident Orton will recover well and wind up world champion many times over... I just wish they'd let him have a Mania moment. At the end of the day, I'll give it a 5/10, and unashamedly call it the worst match of the night.
On the whole, though, despite the major letdown that was the main event, the rest of the card was great. There were some bad segments, some jittery sections, some start and stop bits, but at the end, it was great - the two other main events were stellar, the undercard had some sleeper hits, and overall, I really enjoyed it. The show, on a whole, warrants an 8/10 from me and could very well have been worthy of being called fantastic if the main event had delivered.
