HOME

Judgement Day (DVD)

Published By: Daniel Needham On: 07/08/2008 10:00

Judgement Day is turning in to a modern mainstay

In the ever changing landscape of WWE pay-per-views, Judgement Day is turning into a modern mainstay, and why wouldn’t it? Two solid shows the past two years have turned around the typical "mid-year doldrums’’ event, into one befitting the road to WWE’s biggest summer event, Summerslam.

And the tone certainly holds firm this year - and if anything, as has been the trend with PPV events this year, has become even better. A quick look down the card should tell you why, as this card is stacked with the organisation’s big names, and has feuds which have been built up quite nicely on Raw, ECW and SmackDown.

The event is headlined by the WWE Championship match between Triple H and Randy Orton, with the added stipulation of it occurring in a steel cage. Like most cage matches, this captures the cat and mouse game of escaping the cage well, without it becoming too much like a game of tag. Pinfall and submissions also count, to the irk of myself, a cage match purist, so the action eventually heads in to its brutal beauty, without being too bloody and nonsensical, and culminates in a well-rounded main event, at just over twenty minutes in length.

SmackDown’s premier title, the World Heavyweight Championship, lay vacant at the beginning of the show, and was fought over by Edge and The Undertaker. Without revealing too much, this bout featured great spurts of brawling, but too often descended into an overly methodical pace, and once it prepared to awaken from its slumber, the ending didn’t go down well with the live audience, and had the soiled odour of ‘sequel-itis’ about it.

ECW was represented in a tag-team contest with the champions John Morrison and The Miz going up against the odd-couple of Kane and CM Punk. The frantic pace throughout the bout worked really well, allowing all competitors to show their abilities without any let up in pace. Definitely would have benefited from a little more time but was still a very enjoyable match without it.

Elsewhere two of my personal favourites fought out what was the match of the night. Chris Jericho and Shawn Michaels have put on some A+ calibre wrestling before and once again this was no different. Under the microscope there may have been a few things to nitpick, but this was nothing short of brilliant. My match of the year thus far.

JBL and John Cena slugged it out in the event opener, which was baffling to say the least. Typical back and forth brawling exasperated by a big pro-Cena crowd made this a bearable match, with these two not renowned for their technical ability, and set the crowd up for a big night of action.

The rest of the card featured a decent quality women’s title match, and an open challenge laid down by MVP, which was eventually taken up by Jeff Hardy. Both matches served their purpose of providing quality undercard entertainment, without overly spectacular.

Some may think that I’m getting lazy with my DVD-PPV ratings, but once again it has truly earnt it, and is a thumbs up to the WWE that they’re starting to string together a good line of events.