BRM Reviews NJPW Wrestle Kingdom XVI in Tokyo Dome: Day 2

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Big Red Machine
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BRM Reviews NJPW Wrestle Kingdom XVI in Tokyo Dome: Day 2

Post by Big Red Machine » Jan 8th, '22, 16:53

NJPW Wrestle Kingdom XVI in Tokyo Dome: Day 2 (1/5/2022)- Tokyo, Japan


I skipped everything on the pre-show. I don’t need to sit through pointless six-man tags on a show that will be long enough as is.


IWGP JR. HEAVYWEIGHT TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: Robbie Eagles & Tiger Mask IV(c) vs. Mega Coaches (Rocky Romero & Ryusuke Taguchi) vs. Bullet Club (Taiji Ishimori & El Phantasmo)- 4/10
They did stuff until we got the to big moment where ELP loaded the boot but Eagles redirected it into Ishimori and all of the babyfaces ganged up on ELP and took the boot off and revealed that it was loaded, and… well… nothing happened, because this is a three-way match and you can’t disqualify anyone, and they’re not the champions anymore so you can’t strip them of the titles. Wait. No. Apparently you CAN disqualify them. As I’ve said many times, I like that idea a lot. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make sense here because of the following important issue: He didn’t actually use it on anyone in this match.
It has been long established in pro wrestling that in order to get disqualified, you need to actually hit an opponent with the weapon or the interfering wrestling needs to actually make physical contact with one of the competitors. That didn’t happen here. ELP accidentally hit his own partner. He is, at this point, like a wrestler who brought a chair into the ring but was stopped before he could use it, which is never a DQ.
This is, of course, compounded by how many times we see heels do things that absolutely should be DQs right in front of a New Japan referee, but there is no DQ.
Then there is the issue for the storyline as a whole. As I noted in my review of last July’s Wrestle Grand Slam in Tokyo Dome (and my other NJPW reviews since then), this story has LONG passed the point where New Japan Pro Wrestling should have taken action. At Wrestle Grand Slam in Tokyo Dome they got the boot off of El Phantasmo’s foot and the referee was trying to inspect it in the middle of a match when Ishimori came in and yanked the suspect item out of the referee’s hand. That should have been an automatic DQ, but let’s ignore that for the moment. Everything thinks this thing is loaded. A referee was trying to inspect it, but Ishimori yanked it away from him. How the f*ck were NJPW officials not waiting at the top of the ramp do demand that the boot be turned over to them for analysis?
That was SIX MONTHS AGO. ELP has used the loaded boot many times since then, but not once did a referee ever even try to check his boot before a match. New Japan has not given a single, solitary sh*t about this cheating for MONTHS… and now that it is rubbed in their faces, they are finally forced to act, and their way of acting is punishing someone who technically hasn’t broken a rule yet, and well after they have lost the titles that they used said boot to cheat to win?

That is not good storytelling. That’s f*cking terrible storytelling. Absolutely terrible. That is MUCH worse than the usual WWE crap where wrestlers just go back and forth costing each other matches and cutting promos on each other because at least in those stories, things are technically being moved forward, even if it is painfully repetitive and overall unproductive, because at least there is logic in that. This was “I know! We’ll have them use a loaded boot for months, and then we’ll pay it off at the Tokyo Dome by having them get caught with it!” and then putting ABSOLUTELY NO THOUGHT into any of the consequences of anything.
Anyway, after the heels were ejected from the match, we got about ninety seconds of nearfalls before Eagles made Rocky rap out, which made it feel like the focus of the match was on the heels and not the guys who won.

MAYU IWATANI & STARLIGHT KID vs. TAM NAKANO & SAYA KAMITANI- 6.75/10
They did moves and dives. It was good (other than the dives where it was clear the targets were purposely positioning themselves to get hit with the move rather than it looking more realistic), but it was just moves. Cool moves, sure, but just nine minutes of moves. I think they gave up on making tags about a quarter of the way in.

FOUR-WAY MATCH FOR THE VACANT NJPW KING OF PRO WRESTLING TITLE: Minoru Suzuki vs. Toru Yano vs. Chase Owens vs. CIMA (w/T-Hawk & El Lindaman)- 4.5/10
Yano walked up to Suzuki before the bell, and Suzuki just punched him in the stomach. I laughed my ass off. Everyone then stomped on Yano until he rolled out of the ring, but unfortunately they didn’t follow him out and keep stomping on him. Suzuki punched Owens and he rolled out, leaving CIMA and Suzuki alone to do some stuff together. The other two yanked Suzuki out of the ring and CIMA dove onto all of them, at which point it turned into your standard four-way, with guys taking turns doing spots with each other. They did a bunch of comedy, which wasn’t as bad as the usual Yano stuff, so that was nice. Then they went back to serious wrestling for the last minute or two. Suzuki pinned Yano with a Gotch-Style Piledriver in about six minutes.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- dumb
Suzuki went back to beating the sh*t out of Yano because he’s Yano and he deserves it. He got Yano in a sleeper hold near the ropes, but Yano just happened to have handcuffs on him (because he was going to cheat, just like the heels in the opener. And yet then do it it’s wrong, but when Yano does it we’re supposed to laugh and cheer), and he managed to handcuff one of Suzuki’s arms to the rope and escape.

NEVER OPENWEIGHT SIX-MAN TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: House of Torture (Yujiro Takahashi, EVIL, & Sho)(c) (w/Dick Togo) vs. CHAOS (Hirooki Goto, YOSHI-HASHI, and Yoh)- 4.75/10
The babyfaces jumped the bell on the heels, which is fine in this case because these heels do it all the time. The heels won via the usual shenanigans. On the bright side, someone (Ishii) came out to try to stop it, which is way too rare in New Japan. The heels attacked Yoh after the match so that Ishii could make the save and jaw with EVIL while EVIL held up his title, letting us know that Ishii wants the belt back.

THE ENTIRE NOAH ROSTER SHOWS UP TO CUT A PROMO- meh
Well, really it was Kenoh and Kaiya Kiyomiya who did the talking, but the idea was that they were talking for all of NOAH. They said they were coming to take NJPW’s spot as the top promotion. The members of LIJ who don’t have big matches tonight came out to confront them, and that was it. I’d think more people would come out to stand up for New Japan.
Shingo said that the NOAH guys didn’t belong in an NJPW ring. Kenoh challenged him to get into the ring and fight them, but Shingo and pals wisely didn’t run in to a fight where the other side has ten times more guys than them.
The Kongo faction said they would put aside their differences with others in NOAH to help fight their common enemy of New Japan.

This wasn’t bad or anything, but this is the sort of segment that I think would have worked a lot better as an angle to set up the NJPW vs. NOAH show rather than something that was clearly set up by an agreement between the companies in order to hype an already-existing show (by which I mean NJPW was clearly to give the NOAH guys time to speak to build up the show, not that the whole confrontation felt “booked.”) It felt like when two MMA fighters try to have a “confrontation” at a weigh-in. It feels like a publicity stunt to try to get some last-minute attention for a show that they know most people are going to skip unless something major happens to get their attention.

SANADA vs. GREAT O-KHAN (w/Aaron Henare)- 4.25/10
I really could have done without the dumb comedy of the referee and Henare not wanting O-Khan to try a plancha. It was made even worse by the fact that Sanada was encouraging O-Khan to do the dive, presumably planning to catch him and counter it, but then when O-Khan did the five, he was too heavy for Sanada to catch so the dive worked perfectly, making Sanada look like a dumbf*ck (which is pretty normal for Sanada, but that doesn’t make this spot any better).
There was also a lot of stuff in this match that just plain didn’t look good. That submission O-Khan was using didn’t look like it would have caused Sanada any pain at all, and there was some other stuff they did that looked pretty rough, and not in the “it’s supposed to be a shoot so it’s not all going to go smoothly” way (though there was some of that, too. Making it all worse if that most of the stuff they did that didn’t look bad wasn’t particularly exciting, either, and the roll-up finish gave this supposedly big match at the biggest show of the year a feeling of unimportance.

JEFF COBB vs. TETSUYA NAITO- 7/10
Cobb charged at Naito right away and absolutely took it to him. Naito took the first opportunity he could and went for Cobb’s knee. He started stomping the knee when Cobb was in the right, and shoved that referee down when the ref tried to pull him off. That should have been a DQ.
Naito continued to work the knee. Cobb used his power and size advantage, though Naito pulled out a surprising feat of strength or two to counteract it. Naito eventually won with the Destino, which kind of annoyed me, because he has a submission finisher that targets the knee, so why not use that? It’s the same thing that often drives me nuts about Tanahashi, who always works the knee and then wins with the High Fly Flow instead of the coverleaf.

NO DISQUALIFICATIONS MATCH FOR THE IWGP UNITED STATES TITLE: KENTA(c) vs. Hiroshi Tanahashi- 9/10
They started out with a Kendo stick swordfight that looked MUCH better than 99% of the ones you’ve seen before. KENTA had apparently planted the briefcase that he cracked over Tanahashi’s head to start this feud off under the ring. He got a lot of other things, too, and he and Tanahashi hit each other with all of them. This was BRUTAL and awesome, and they didn’t even need to go the deathmatch route with thumbtacks and stuff. They just grabbed stuff and beat the crap out of each other with it and tried to hurt each other for the sake of winning the match, and that’s what made this match work. That and the blood, which I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen in New Japan. That happened when KENTA was on a ladder that rivals the “big orange” ladder that got used at ROH Man Up and Tanahashi tipped it over and poor KENTA’s face slammed into a trash can. Then Tanahashi climbed up Andre The Giant Ladder and hit the highest High Fly Flow for the win. This was a war, plain and simple.

IWGP WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Kazuchika Okada(c) vs. Will Ospreay (w/Aaron Henare & Great O-Khan)- 9.25/10
Red Shoes was up to his usual bullsh*t, refusing to count because Ospreay punched Okada on the outside and bent him over the guardrail while taunting him. Red Shoes is so concerned about the rules being followed that he won’t count a pinfall after that… but when they were on the outside, he wasn’t concerned about the rules enough to do what he’s supposed to do and count them out. This is the sort of thing that drives me nuts. How does someone not see that it’s completely ridiculous to make a big deal out of a minor rule like a strike with a closed fist that happens a million times a show, while that same person was completely ignoring the enforcement of a major rule like “there is a twenty-count on the floor, and anyone not back in the ring by twenty is counted out?”
And that’s the MOST logic way to look at what just happened. As usual, Kevin Kelly has a far stupider take, which is that Red Shoes decided that he didn’t like the way Ospreay was covering Okada (which didn’t look like there was anything wrong with it to me) so he refused to make the count.
They fought on the outside forever without getting counted out so they could do their big spot (Ospreay climbing up a tress and doing a moonsault press off of it).
Okay. All of that out of the way, this was tremendous. The pacing was outstanding (much better than last night’s main event), and both guys brought a wonderful sense of desperation and determination throughout. Final five or six minutes of finisher and reversal of finisher and kickout with both men in total kill-mode were amazing.


This was a very good show from New Japan, but it was completely saved by the top three matches. These two-night Wrestle Kingdoms have resulted in long shows full of matches that mostly don’t feel important. Combine that with the copious interference and general poor logic in New Japan stories, and you have an event that often drags. It’s quite possible that I wouldn’t have enjoyed the top two matches anywhere near as much if I hadn’t watched them before the rest of the card. This weekend of shows has solidified my opinion of New Japan: a group of extremely talented works often being hampered by bad or lazy booking. There are some who will overlook anything if the stuff at the top of the card works out, but I’m not one of those people.
Hold #712: ARM BAR!

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