Performance Review – AEW Dynamite (5/13/20)

Overall Evaluation and Achieved Goals

AEW and WWE are both run by marks, but with WWE it’s the sports marks and AEW it’s the wrestling marks. These wrestling marks are making sure that even in the midst of uncertainty, there is a whole lot of activity on their wrestling shows: wrestlers in the crowd gives it an audience, folks who haven’t worked in a month or two are doing all their stuff in long matches, and the lead babyface driving his car through a barricade then exiting to go fight his rival.

The car thing looked really dumb, like a gut punch of “aw that was weak.” This is still the wrestling show I look forward to right now by far.

Areas of Excellence Within Performance

Best Friends vs. Jurassic Express was totally the kind of AEW match that might’ve ran together with all the others last year, but seeing these guys get time and throw strikes and take bumps and do dives in 2020 felt pretty epic. Luchasaurus does a spinning V-Trigger, by golly. Jungle Boy was bumping like he meant it too.

The Britt Baker vs. Hikaru Shida vs. Kris Statlander vs. Penelope Ford match was a bit much with a Canadian Destroyer and handspring cutter and poison hurricanrana all performed questionably, but also – it’s been a while. They let loose and had a wild match. It was nice.

Kenny Omega & Matt Hardy vs. Santana & Ortiz was a super solid tag missing an extra spark, outside of Santana and Sammy Guevera going all in on their Twist of Fate bumps.

MJF squash – check.

Darby Allin has a kind of stilted dialect but it’s like Jeff Hardy where it doesn’t matter because it’ll resonate.

Christopher Daniels both got way too much offense and had a really rock solid match with Brodie Lee.

Suggested Areas of Improvement

Brodie Lee still needs new gear. This isn’t serious until he gets it.

Top Plays of the Week

3. Santana Swivels: GET LOOSE!
2. Britt Baker Applies a Glove-Assisted Lockjaw: BE SAFE!
1. Chris Jericho Smashes Vanguard-1: TRAGICOMEDY!

Official Star Rating

3.75 out of 5 Stars

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