Let's Do the Time Warp Again: WWE Money in the Bank '13 Review

In the TH style.

Highlights:

• In the pre-show, Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns used a buckle bomb and spear combo to retain the WWE Tag Team Championships.
• Damien Sandow ripped his own partner, Cody Rhodes, from the ladder, and snaked his way to a banked World Heavyweight Championship shot in the Blue Briefcase Money in the Bank match.
• Curtis Axel countered a Figure 4 attempt with a seated axe kick and rope kick before planting Miz with his neckbreaker variant to retain the Intercontinental Championship.
• AJ Lee tapped Kaitlyn with a lightning quick application of the Black Widow to retain the Divas Championship.
• Ryback beguiled Chris Jericho in lieu of using brute force, catching him with a school boy roll up for the win.
• Lee decked Alberto del Rio in plain sight of the referee, causing Dolph Ziggler to be disqualified in his bid for the World Heavyweight Championship.
• John Cena OVERCAME THE ODDS SO HARD to apply the STF to Mark Henry en route to keeping the WWE Championship
• After Axel prevented Daniel Bryan from claiming the WWE Championship briefcase, Paul Heyman slammed a ladder repeatedly into CM Punk's back to prevent him from doing the same.
• After nailing Rob van Dam with a RKO off the ladder, Randy Orton claimed the Red Briefcase for his own.

General Observations:

• In the rush to get things ready and get my son to bed, I missed out on the fact that WWE actually put the pre-show match on the pay-per-view feed this year. I missed out on a YUUUUGE chunk of the Usos/Shield match.
• RVD chants, during that match? DAMN YOU, PHILLY. I cam *thiiiiiiis* close to disowning them until they started chanting "This is awesome!"
• Of course, a stacked combo powerbomb and superplex out of the corner will make any crowd come alive.
• Dean Ambrose? CRAZY OVER.
• I kinda fogged out when Zeb Colter was cutting another one of his 'Murca promos that the crowd didn't get the memo on being ironic or heelish, so was the gist of his speech something about Fourthmeal?
• Speaking of promos, Damien Sandow snagged the microphone from Cody Rhodes, which I think might have been foreshadowing, guys.
• I didn't think there was anything that could enhance Antonio Cesaro's natural hossiness. Then he went and had a ladder for his canvas of impact on a gutwrench suplex to Cody Rhodes.
• At one point, Wade Barrett was just looking for a ladder to use, and he just ripped the bottom rung off one of them on the outside. He came back to beat everyone he could find within arm's length, and it was the most interesting thing he's done in months.
• Cesaro and Ambrose jousted atop the ladder which led to Ambrose taking that neck crank thing that Cesaro does from the top of the ladder. I would hesitate taking that on ground level. Of course, Cesaro upped the crazy by taking a muscle buster from Rhodes just after that ON TOP OF A FUCKING LADDER. People say Samoa Joe punched a wall or something. I can't think anyone would be mad at that except for Cesaro, depending on how he landed.
• Ambrose tried to play whirlybird with the ladder at one point, and both Cesaro and Jack Swagger grabbed it from either end. Any lesser man would've taken a bump right away. Ambrose skinned the cat to get on top of the ladder. Let me repeat that. He skinned the fucking cat to get on top of the ladder. Sure, the newly-minted Real Americans just dumped him anyway, but who cares, Dean fuckin' Ambrose skinned the cat on a goddamn ladder.
• I don't care if he disappears next week. Fandango running up the ladder just to give Barrett the sunset flip bomb off said ladder makes him golden with me for the rest of his life.
• CROSS RHODESES FOR EVERYONE! BABYFACE FIRE! CODY RHODES IS A MADE MAN IN PHILADELPHIA!
• I totally saw The Shield running in. I just didn't think it'd be the Usos coming back down to take them out, although it made sense. Them sucking the Real Americans into their brawl reminded me of this clip. And of course Ambrose went tumbling into them, courtesy of Rhodes. OF COURSE HE DID.
• That finish, with Sandow sneaking in right at the end, was the best possible finish for his character. Brilliance.
• Brad Maddox getting Justin Roberts' name wrong won't ever get old.
• If I wasn't so sure Vickie Guerrero was never going to give comeuppance to anyone in WWE, I might have enjoyed the career retrospective Maddox gave her.
• The Miz broke out the old Eddie Guerrero make-a-slap-noise-and-drop-to-the-ground trick, only instead of getting the disqualification win, he got Paul Heyman tossed out. The camera panned back to Miz's face as he sarcastically smirked to the departing Heyman, and it totally made that sequence. OF course though, the crowd chanted "We want Heyman!" I kinda agree with JBL though; why would you like the man who was just as responsible for taking ECW away from you as he was giving it to you?
• The crowd turned on Miz, and he rolled with it, taunting them at every turn. That's why I can never wholly hate on the man. He gets it.
• I also really dug his bridge on the Figure 4. Look, he's never going to do it as well as Ric Flair, so why not make it his own in the process?
• I don't know whether to marvel at Kaitlyn opening the Divas Championship match with a hard slap to the babymaker or to revile at it. I lean towards the former though, but I'm a bit dark.
• AJ Lee has developed into such a good in-ring performer, with the best example to me coming when she was working Kaitlyn's arm over, working in various keylock variations and really keeping Kaitlyn vexed. She's got a solid grasp of psychology.
• On the second throw-back to the analysts' panel during the show, I noticed that the only one who looked into the right camera was Guerrero. Both Big Show and Kofi Kingston were looking off askew. Not only is she a heat magnet, but she's got camera presence!
• I know there's a lot to correlate between sexuality and pro wrestling, but it's just funny when it comes as overtly as Chris Jericho flying off the top rope to deliver a donkey punch to Ryback.
• I actually thought Ryback winning the match with a roll up was sublime booking. It will help him in the long run, even if now, it makes him look "weak." The goal is not to make him a Goldberg clone, right?
• Dolph Ziggler broke out the elbow spam early. He hammed it up on the tenth one, but I think the Philly crowd wasn't expecting him to show off that much. Silly Philly crowd.
• Sign of the night "Dolphin Uranus." No, it wasn't subtle. But sometimes, I just want to be slapped in the face with a topical anal sex joke, okay?
• Alberto del Rio broke out his signature missed-dropkick-through-the-ropes-to-the-floor bump, and then Ziggler baited him perfectly into a stun gun from the ring into the middle rope. It was a perfect sequence.
• Ziggler busted out the avalanche X-Factor at one point, then shortly after, tried to do a Fame Asser that del Rio countered slickly into a German suplex. I think he was just tired of seeing Ziggler trying to kiss up to Triple H by using his buddy's moves.
• Oh, hello Ms. Lee! Of course she was a distraction. Girls can't be anything but bitches or distractions in WWE. AMIRITE GUISE? And of course she'd end up costing Ziggler the match with a broad-daylight attack on del Rio. IN theory, it's a great angle at least.
• Mark Henry got that POP upon entrance, restoring my faith in my hometown crowd. My people. My town.
• "HOW HUNGRY ARE YOU?" The best in-match shit-talker of all-time as he had John Cena pie-faced in the ropes.
• I'm not sure if he was supposed to go all the way through to the floor, but yeah, Henry did the Bossman thump while Cena as face down on the ropes and went all the way to the floor. The hoss can be a graceful being.
• It's one thing to have Cena overcome the odds on Henry's sheer size and strength. It's another to have him overcome the exposed turnbuckle. It's still another to have him overcome the low blow. But all three in the same match? It's getting old, guys. Maybe that's why I can never get sick of Cena/CM Punk matches. He always treats Punk like an equal.
• I saw you leaping for that briefcase from a vertical base, Rob van Dam. Stop trying to endear yourself to me.
• RVD did his usual point-to-self taunt, and everyone descended on him like locusts. I got a kick out of that, I admit.
• Daniel Bryan and CM Punk staring each other down in Philadelphia? The vapors, I has them.
• For all the shit I give RVD, the Philly crowd was WAY into him. It almost masked his shitty offense, although he actually looked like he cared at least a little here.
• I don't know if it was a commentary on his career, but I thoroughly enjoyed Christian beating the shit out of everyone with the four-foot stepladder.
• Sheamus set up the Sin Cara Memorial Ladder Bridge between the apron and the announce table, and I thought he was going to break Bryan with it. But Bryan flipped him over the ladder and landed the running apron knee instead. That was a *whew* moment, if only for a second.
• In what will surely be the DVD cover, all six guys were jousting for the briefcase at one point on two ladders, predictably but satisfyingly ending in the Earth-shattering kaboom of all them crashing to the floor. Sometimes, all a guy wants is some carnage.
• I wonder if anyone got a shot of Sheamus' bare ass when Punk pulled his tights down to yank him from hanging from the briefcase?
• Christian was climbing the ladder, trying to escape from RVD, when RVD decided he was going to try out a new breed of enema. I'm telling you, these guys are brave for even agreeing to a dude shoving a ladder up their asses, even in a pulled fashion.
• CHEKHOV'S LADDER ALERT: It was Sheamus who took the bump of the night, pegging the Ziggler Scale and crashing through his own goddamn ladder set up when Bryan attained his limit break and looked like he was going to win the match, until...
• ...a wild Curtis Axel appeared! His interference wrecked the flow of the match, a feat only exacerbated by Heyman's turn on Punk. I will say, though, that I'm excited for the nuanced storytelling that could come from this.
• Even if Orton wasn't the guy I wanted to win, I will say that his RKO of RVD off the ladder was kinda cool.

Match of the Night:Antonio Cesaro vs. Cody Rhodes vs. Damien Sandow vs. Dean Ambrose vs. Fandango vs. Jack Swagger vs. Wade Barrett, World Championship Shot Money in the Bank Ladder Match - The Blue Briefcase Money in the Bank ladder match was the thirteenth of its kind. I don't know if that number is a large enough sample size to definitively say that the form has attained perfection, but I saw masses of bodies move both harmoniously and in erratic entropy. I witnessed storytelling and raw spot play, teamwork and iconoclasm, catharsis snatched away from the crowd and the son of a son of a plumber at the last possible moment. Again, I'm not sure that we've seen enough of these matches to know what perfection looks like, but I'd be hard-pressed to say that any of the twelve preceding this match and the one that succeeded it at the end of the show were any better.

The thing about Money in the Bank is that it's inherently a junk food match, one where stories don't go to resolve, but where ones end up starting, or at the very least kicking into overdrive. So when psychology gets interwoven into the foray, and not just the kind of psych that usually pops up spur of the moment within a match, the whole proceedings get elevated. When Ambrose was announced as a participant in the match, everyone had to figure the rest of The Shield would get involved as well. They did, and when the Usos came out to neutralize the interlopers, they sucked another team into the vortex. The Real Americans got a newly-pressed name out of the whole thing, but before they leaped headlong into a tag war between a heretofore unknown police state and Samoa, they created some moments of synergy that I'm not sure had ever visited upon Money in the Bank.

When Jack Swagger served as the anthropomorphic stilts for Antonio Cesaro, I jumped out my chair and pumped my fist. I knew Cesaro wouldn't snag the briefcase and instead would just serve as a canvas for another high-impact, approaching-full-Ziggler bump. But the idea of it, two guys working together to make sure at least one of them was able to win individual glory, it flies in the face of traditional WWE logic, heel or face, that it refreshed an entire match concept. Even if most of their teamwork backfired on them, most spectacularly when Ambrose SKINNED THE GODDAMN CAT ON A LADDER they were bridging between themselves, it felt new.

But the story of the match was the rise of Cody Rhodes. It's intriguing that all you have to do in WWE is hit a few people with your finisher and look hella cool doing it to be the next big thing. It's almost like WWE audiences, as a collective, value badassery over traditional good guy traits. Hmm. Still, Rhodes didn't just break out all his stored finishes from inventory, but he did so with genetic Runnels family babyface fire. He earned catharsis from that crowd, but then again, in WWE, they really make you work for that kind of payoff if you're a good guy. Turning in one night isn't good enough. That's why Damien Sandow had to win. That's why he had to plunge the knife in the back of Rhodes Scholars. Because Rhodes' moment comes on another day.

Overall Thoughts: The final two matches hearkened back to the dark ages of WWE's current era. Randy Orton and John Cena looked to be on a collision course yet again, much to the chagrin of many people I follow on the Twitters. I will admit I got chills from a colder, less WWE-friendly time in my fandom. I want to see another Cena/Orton pay-per-view main event like I want to get sharpened bamboo shoots shoved underneath my fingernails. But is that the charted course? When has the briefcase ever meant a SummerSlam main event? The Miz waited until right after Survivor Series to cash his briefcase in. Alberto del Rio used his as deus ex machina AFTER the main event at the WrestleMania-of-the-Summer. Cena himself waited all of two weeks before whiffing on his attempt.

Plus, how does anyone know this is an automatic title win for Orton? Right now, there are three guys I can see winning a briefcase and failing on the cash-in. One already whiffed on his shot. Another just got his world rocked by his best friend. The third is Orton, a guy who has held nearly double-digits in World-level Championships, and who has been firmly entrenched in the main event scene for one year short of a decade. I'm not saying he is going to fail, and I'm also not saying he's a lock to cash in on Cena. What I am saying though, is that there feels like an endgame afoot, and it's one that doesn't involve another three-to-five pay-per-view dose of WWE-brand ipecac.

More than anything, it's not the Orton half of that specific title matchup that I fear. Cena's match with Mark Henry was everything I hated from your standard Champ-Is-Here title defense. It's never enough for Cena to take one strain of weakness and work it until a logical conclusion appears. Henry's girth and strength was the perfect avenue for Cena to travel down, but no, we needed exposed turnbuckles and a low blow too. There's garnering heat, and then there's overkill. That's where the show kinda took a left turn for me.

Up until the WWE Championship match though, the show looked as if it was going to be one of those pantheon WWE pay-per-views, like Payback reputedly was this year (I still haven't seen it, frown-face), or like Money in the Bank '11, Extreme Rules '12, or WrestleMania X-7 became. I've written gobs and gobs about the first ladder match, but there were stellar performances from likely and unlikely places in nearly every match. Whether it was from the Usos, AJ Lee, The Miz, Ryback, Alberto del Rio, or Dolph Ziggler, there was at least one person in every match making moments happen.

I won't even crap on the last two matches too much. Henry did his best to keep things from going pear-shaped in the WWE Title match, and the RAW briefcase match was fine until Curtis Axel's interference threw everything into a logjam. All-in-all, I think it's a show worth the replay or the DVD purchase, even if the finishes of the last two matches feel like a piece of ancient history deja vu.