BRM Reviews NJPW Kizuna Road 2014: Day 2

[Big Red Machine]

NJPW Kizuna Road 2014: Day 2 (6/29/2014)- Tokyo, Japan

JUSHIN "THUNDER" LIGER, TIGER MASK IV, & MASARA DORADA vs. BUSHI, FUEGO, & YOHEI KOMATSU- 5.5/10
LUCHA! Yohei Komatsu also looked great.

YUJI NAGATA, CAPTAIN NEW JAPAN, & MANABU NAKANISHI vs. RYUSUKE TAGUCHI, HIROYOSHI TENZAN, & SATOSHI KOJIMA- 5.75/10

CHAOS (Toru Yano & YOSHI-HASHI) vs. SUZUKI-GUN (w/Minoru Suzuki vs. Takashi Iizuka)- DUD!
I feel like I've seen this a million times before. It's the same sh*tty match you always get when Iizuka and Yano are involved. At least this time they actually had a DQ, but it was only one weapon shot out of at least ten right in front of the referee with no consequences. Of course, this DQ happened when the heels were in complete control of the match and could have won at any time, but they decided to get DQed instead because... um...
They also did that stupid spot that they did a t Dominion in which Suzuki, the heel, made Yano, the babyface, look like a complete goof. All that this turn has done is dragged Suzuki's matches down by forcing him into this feud. Suzuki put Yano in a cross armbreaker after the match. Then Iizuka got half-way up the aisle before randomly deciding to walk through the crowd instead.

HIROOKI GOTO & KATSUYORI SHIBATA vs. GREAT BASH HEEL (Tomoaki Honma & Togi Makabe)- 4/10
So Shibata and Goto are standing there together while Makabe and Honma make their entrance, and Honma gets in Shibata's face and they have an intense stare-down... and while all of this is going on, Makabe is just playing to the crowd and posing, seemingly totally oblivious, while Goto just stood there looking like a dork like he was waiting for Makabe to come get in his face. When he finally turned around, instead of getting Goto's face, Makabe instead pulled Honma away from Shibata.
Then the match started with Makabe hitting his opponents with a big double clothesline. I can't figure out if he is supposed to be a heel now (yeah, I know it is in the name of the stable, but he has been a babyface for about a year now) because he jumped them when they weren't ready... but f that was the case, why would he attack them when they were BOTH LOOKING RIGHT AT HIM?
The match itself was competently worked, but pretty boring. They just failed to make me care about anything.


KOTA IBUSHI, TETSUYA NAITO, & EL DESPERADO vs. HIROSHI TANAHASHI & TIME SPLITTERS (Alex Shelley & KUSHIDA)-6.75/10
Tanahashi and Naito pretty much disappeared for a while and we got a good Jr. Heavyweight tag team match with Desperado going over via low blow on Shelley. Normally I would love a good heel finish, but we just spend an entire Best of the Super Juniors Tournament with Taichi being a super-douchy heel to Desperado? Should he get some revenge on the heels before turning heel on someone else?

BULLET CLUB (Bad Luck Fale, Tama Tonga, Doc Gallows, & Karl "Machine Gun" Anderson) vs. CHAOS (Kazuchika Okada, Shinsuke Nakamura, Rocky Romero, & Alex Koslov) (w/Gedo)- 7.75/10
Everyone was great, but the two who stood out the most to me were Anderson and Tonga, and for completely different reasons. Anderson was just awesome in the ring. His stuff all looked great, he looked like a star, like real threat to Okada, and he did a GREAT job making the backslide a believable false finish. Tonga, for his part, was totally awesome as an enthusiastic heel who just kept missing his moves. No matter how many times the babyfaces got out of the way, he would not give up and kept trying to hit dis big jumping moves. I LOVED it. He had this almost babyface-ish determination about him despite being a heel, but because he was a heel, every single time he would so air and then come crashing down and miss, it was HILARIOUS!

NEVER OPENWEIGHT TITLE MATCH: Tomohiro Ishii(c) vs. Yujiro Takahashi- 7.25/10
Yujiro plays cowardly heel until he gets the advantage on the outside by dropping Ishii on the guardrails twice. They tried to do a German suplex into the turnbuckle, but they missed by quite a bit and Ishii hit his head on the middle rope (about a foot form the corner) instead. I have no doubt that this hurt, and Ishii did sell it, but it just looked so much lamer than hitting the turnbuckle would have (and the turnbuckle probably has more padding, too).
Yujiro then proceeded to work over Ishii's neck until Ishii started no-selling forearms to the head. Then he started active blocking them with headbutts. He knocked Yujiro down with a big forearm, then followed him to the outside and tossed him into the guardrails and it was all really good until Ishiii, the babyface, attacked the heel with a chair. Right in front of the referee... and there was no DQ.
The Bullet Club interfered after a ref bump (they actually caused the ref bump by pulling the ref out of the ring, and the ref hit the guardrail pretty hard, screwing Ishii out of a win), but Ishii's CHAOS buddies came out to fight them off and they all brawled to the back. The idea that we could get Gallows & Anderson vs. Nakamura & Okada has me very, very happy. I was also very happy with the finish, which saw Yujiro hit an awesome-looking spinning Death Valley Driver-type move and get the pin, taking the title from Ishii. The irony, of course, is that in the match where they finally take the belt off of Ishii, he finally stops doing that obnoxious constant no-selling.

A good show from New Japan.