8 Match Star Ratings For WWE Royal Rumble 2020
3. The Fiend Vs. Daniel Bryan - Universal Championship Strap Match
The Fiend is not to your writer's subjective tastes. This particular Fiend match drew a relatively strong crowd reaction, and was well-worked in its own specific, divisive context, and it was not drenched in that putrid, migraine-inducing red light.
This is a way of saying that it worked for others, just not for me personally, in a bid to remain objective.
The problem with the Fiend is a profound psychological gap that renders most of the story beats arbitrary and difficult to invest in. Unlike other monsters - the stomach of Brock Lesnar, the slow pace of the Big Show et al. - with the possible exception of his testicles, there is no definable weak spot to the Fiend's game that one can detect as a shift in momentum, thus undermining the babyface comeback. There's no sense that he can be overcome, if the babyface is intelligent and resilient enough. It's essentially hopeless, and if it is the mask, as was possibly alluded to here, what happens when it's removed? Is...is that it? That is a Shyamalan twist, if indeed it is the case.
At least, with that red light not bearing down, the crowd was able to register the horrendous welts over Bryan's body, which added a layer of realism and humanity to a spectacle that is ordinarily too cartoonish to take seriously. The horror-movie-in-a-wrestling-ring bit is inherently farcical, but the decision to go for torture-porn as the sub-genre was effective enough.
Bryan, being a genius, actually contrived to make this halfway-realistic with his expert sense of timing and snug execution. But his clever strategy, of pulling the Fiend into positions of harm, ultimately held no weight. The match was at its best when it most resembled a wrestling match - Bryan's babyface fire was awesome at points - but, in the end, the Fiend, unaffected, no-sold the strap he'd sold for 10 minutes and just simply won.
Star Rating: ★★¾