5 Ups & 5 Downs From AEW Dynamite 200 (August 2 - Review)
4. Jon Moxley Vs Trent Beretta Vs Penta El Zero M
The TV show Scrubs once introduced a love interest for Zach Braff’s character’s whose primary flaw was that she said “that’s funny” rather than actually laughing at what he said. It was identified as a significant personality flaw of the female rather than entirely about his relentless and exhausting vanity (such was the gender dynamic on every show for about seventy years - Seinfeld, Friends, The Office and others had variations of the bit, How I Met Your Mother is an entire show premised on it) but it cut to the core of the experience many of us having watching comedy in wrestling.
Occasionally - super super occasionally, and in short bursts from very specific characters - wrestling is laugh-out-loud funny, but more often than not, the writing or creative or both has done well to achieve something resembling humour and the brain will instruct you to think “that’s funny” rather than actually bark out a laugh.
This match-to-build-a-match was that, for violence. Jon Moxley rolling around in tacks isn’t yet as formulaic as when Abyss would grab the bag in TNA, but him doing B.S blood-and-plunder certainly is. Penta’s flipping piledriver through the table rightfully popped the building but didn’t remotely leap through the screen. “That’s violent”, went the brain. Trent and Moxley superplexed through a table from ring to floor; “that’s so violent” went the brain, beaten down by so many cut-and-paste efforts like this that it’s impossible to care about one’s where the characters are so played-out and stale.Orange Cassidy is still maybe the best Champion in wrestling but is colder for hanging around with all these middling characters, and the same can be said for Jon Moxley and the washed Blackpool Combat Club. The Parking Lot Brawl is a nice way to toast a return to Daily’s Place for Rampage, but one great moment in 200 episodes is a pretty shocking return rate for a Best Friends act that persists with its low stakes angles and Lucha Brothers on their never ending violence-for-hire treadmill.
Guys bled for their art, but there’s a wider malaise across much of AEW at present and it felt as though this was the specific place to drop the pin in the sprawling map.