NJPW 1/4/2017 - Kenny Omega vs Kazuchika Okada Review

Am back guys. Saw all the hoopla on this and felt forced to comment on it. Anyone who knows me knows I'm not a fan of the flippy indy stuff at all. With that being said, I tried my best to give this a chance.

My review:

Nothing was wrong with the early portion of the match but nothing really stuck out. The biggest thing I noticed is that Omega rushes and goes at 100MPH on everything, whether it be moves or transitions. There's no struggle, there's no fight, he just does his shit and that's the way it is.

Then the late middle of the match hits. Omega hits a super dragon suplex, which AFAIK, I don't believe I've ever seen, at least as a non-release version. They wait about 3 seconds and they do a 2.9 kickout. Wut? This pretty much destroyed the match. I've watched wrestling for over 20+ years and I've never seen this move done, making it quite important...and it's used a transition.

Match is pretty much just 100MPH garbage from there on out. Omega does cartoony flip bumps for everything. Lots of reversals and big moves and video game style wrestling. Omega literally had to drag Okada out of selling for most of the match to do that next big move. Okada gets the win and it was about as bad as the Omega/Ibushi Sumo Hall match a few years ago.

Now onto the rating. I look for these types of things when I want to judge how good a match was:

- How realistic it was?

- How effective was it at hitting the simple things right to make the bigger things more meaningful?

- The heat

- Did they take it to the next level and make it truly unique?

- Did they botch anything?

- Did it flow from start to finish?

- Did it have any real story to it?

- Did they have any particularly memorable exchanges?

And suffice to say, it doesn't really hold its weight. The heat wasn't anything special. I didn't see any story except for "your move/my move". It wasn't realistic in any way. They didn't really botch anything. Flow was okay til the Dragon Suplex and there weren't any real exchanges. No one did anything much different here or worked better than they can. Kenny, while a very nice person IRL, would have worked a match at a random indy show the same exact way.

I thought it was building towards a 3-4 star match up until the dragon suplex and I guess that move scrambled both guys brains because it went to indy hell right after. While the early portion wasn't that bad, nothing was set up in the early portion of the match to make the second half of the match better. And when the second half of the match came, there was nothing to fall back on or work with.

If this is what symbolizes wrestling in 2016, I'll just stick to old AJW and old Memphis, because this was crap. I'd give it maybe somewhere between 1-3 stars tops and I truly just want to give it a big fat flying 1 star rating.