10 WWE Backlash 2020 Impulse Reactions
3. The Street Profits (c) Vs. The Viking Raiders
To recap, review, or to rip it up and start again?
That's still the question in the immediacy of yet another catastrophically lame cinematic offering from WWE that somehow managed to be A Thing, be nothing at all, and not even provide the match the company had decided to promote just hours before the show.
The Street Profits and The Viking Raiders have been involved in a diminished returns oneupmanship story for the last month, spending more time with each other than most of the population of the world has with their own friends and families, but it was tonight that the hostilities apparently boiled over.
There was a minute or so where that was the stupidest thing about this f*cking thing.
A backstage fight was drab walk-and-brawl "comedy" before Akira Tozawa and a gang of motorbike ninjas turned up and it turned into a broad homage of that genre instead just of a p*ss-weak parody of pro wrestling. Problematic connotations aside, there was - as is the crushing norm - no effort to draw any lines between the characters beyond the Raw guys linking arms to fight off the baddies. The action itself wasn't funny or entertaining, nor did it supply an ending other than the four waking up in surrounded by garbage in a fairly apt closing visual gag.
This was pathetic and - unapologetically - the company's standards should be way higher.