After an uneven (at best) build and an iffy card, WWE SummerSlam finally launched Saturday night with – you guessed it – an uneven and iffy presentation.
Night one of the summer spectacle produced three really good matches and three that varied from average to outright disasters.
Unfortunately for WWE, they juggled the card and stuck one of the worst matches of the night on last, closing the show with the Hell in a Cell match that barely made use of the cell. Oba Femi versus Brock Lesnar was a massive disappointment in almost every way. The only silver lining is that Oba should be able to escape from this relatively unscathed. His finisher, however, was not as lucky.
Cody Rhodes and CM Punk seemed to take their placement personally, as they delivered a long, old-school title bout, spending large swaths of their match working limbs but managing to keep the fans engaged. They kept the extracurriculars to a minimum, which also could become a contrasting point if the World Heavyweight Championship match goes for melodrama and interference spots galore on Sunday.
Everything else fell somewhere in-between these two matches. All told, this was a mostly easy watch, with only one actively bad match (not the main event), but it’s still an indictment of WWE that they have a stadium show for one of their biggest PLEs of the year, and rather than be blow-away great, it’s a mixed bag of excellent, average, and utter dreck.
Let’s get to it…
