9 Ups & 1 Down From AEW Dynamite: Holiday Bash
1. The Sheer Joy That Is Professional Wrestling
The news is relentlessly, oppressively bleak.
Every headline generates a new mutant strain of anxiety. We prepare for another year of doom and, if we're lucky, fleeting, asterisked joy. We have things like video games and music and pro wrestling as a distraction from the bullsh*t, and for 25 loving, joyful minutes, the Dynamite main event yielded an incredible spectacle that functioned to provide precisely that.
CM Punk wore Surfer Sting make-up and looked nothing like a mark because Sting used Punk's iconography too. With the use of face paint, AEW perfected the opposite of WWE's rancid "Can they co-exist?" energy.
It was more than a nostalgic, nerdy thrill. In one of several sequences designed to keep CM Punk and MJF from touching, MJF sprinted up a bleacher in cowardice. Punk chased him all the way and corralled him back into the arena. This one spot further built the anticipation of their showdown, popped fans with its delightful sight gag, and rebuffed MJF's digs that the greying Punk is a knackered old man. It also set up Darby Allin flooring MJFTR with his incredible lopé. What a thrilling arrangement.
Darby took two gnarly tumbles in one bump, to highlight the sheer overdrive of fun chaos. FTR were total stamina machines, working awesome double team sequences with Allin and Punk, the latter of which was highlighted with a tremendous GTS into a Big Rig counter.
Sting did look very knackered at one point, after entering a performance of total magic, but this was expected. Sting is such a great worker at f*cking 62 years old that he works around the fatigue now by selling the real exhaustion and "involuntarily" landing face-first on the pr*ck heel's balls.
The giddy chaos did threaten to undermine the other real thing wrestling actually is - a safe collaboration - when Sting misjudged his throw of MJF to the outside. That bump was frightening. Mercifully, MJF seemed OK, and this sense of relief allowed the multi-finisher Dax Harwood overkill spot to work as euphorically well as it did.
It was sloppy in places, but in a way nobody gave a sh*t about because this was the most unbridled fun AEW has delivered since the first Stadium Stampede.
Apparently, AEW lacks real heat, as if that even works for the psychological make-up of the jaded 2021 public. When the catharsis is this overwhelmingly satisfying, who really gives a f*ck?