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Camping World Stadium - 4/2/17 |
Amazingly in 2017 WWE put on an even LONGER show than WM32 - the Kickoff started at 5pm Eastern and the main PPV ended at 12:13am. Jeezus H. Christ guys. I believe the phrase "too much of a good thing" was invented specifically for modern WWE PPVs. Anyway, 'Mania 33 had a surprising amount of good stuff, considering how unenthusiastic I was going in. Where 'Mania 32 was about half-good, 'Mania 33 upped that to about two-thirds, and even the bad stuff was pretty inoffensive. Sadly most of the weak matches happened in the final third of the show. Cut an hour out of the main PPV and you'd have something approaching an A- grade. But let's take the deep dive.
First the pre-show stuff. The Cruiserweights kicked things off with a quite nice bout that got a shocking 16 minutes. Neville and Austin Aries worked pretty hard to deliver something memorable and for the most part succeeded. WWE took a commercial break in the middle, which needs to fucking stop. There is zero excuse for this. It's your own network and you have the option to present matches uninterrupted. Anyway, we got some pretty intense action culminating in Aries hitting a 450 splash, followed by the Last Chancery. Neville appeared on the verge of tapping out but gouged Aries' injured eye to escape and hit the Red Arrow to retain. Solid stuff.
The Andre Battle Royal was next, and as usual it was silly at best. Big Show and Braun Strowman were eliminated mindbogglingly early, at which point I assumed Sami Zayn would probably get a nice little win here. But when they showed Rob Gronkowski in the front row prior to the bell I should've smelled a rat. Sure enough, Gronk got into an altercation with Jinder Mahal which led to him getting in the ring and shoulderblocking Mahal, allowing Mojo Rawley to recover from an earlier attack and win the whole thing. This was purely to get a bit of mainstream media coverage and Mojo Rawley didn't benefit from this win whatsoever. Once again the Andre Battle Royal serves very little purpose.
The third pre-show match, and the most infuriating, was Dean Ambrose vs. Baron Corbin for the I-C belt. Why this particular belt has been so devalued is beyond me. Ambrose and Corbin did nothing in this match to earn a main PPV slot, but it struck me as a chicken-and-egg scenario. Did they phone it in because they were on the pre-show, or were they on the pre-show because the company knew they'd phone it in? This was an entirely forgettable bout which got ten minutes and ended with Ambrose reversing End of Days into Dirty Deeds to retain.
The PPV proper kicked off with AJ Styles vs. Shane McMahon in a pretty shockingly good match. I was torn on this because Shane was booked to be a step ahead of AJ for most of the bout, but I'll be damned if it wasn't entertaining. Many of the spots were way over-the-top, including Shane countering AJ's 450 splash into a triangle choke, Shane missing a Shooting Star Press, AJ trying the Van Terminator but running into a trash can, and Shane doing his own Van Terminator. AJ finally took the win after hitting the Phenomenal Forearm, capping off what turned out to be the best match of the night. Nothing even approaching AJ's bouts with Cena, but this was a lot of fun. AJ turned babyface after this and feuded with Kevin Owens for the US Title for a while before regaining the WWE Title late in the year.