WWE Hell in a Cell 2016: Reactions & Review

T.J. Perkins (c) vs. Brian Kendrick (WWE Cruiserweight Championship)

Reactions: Another solid match from T.J. Perkins and Brian Kendrick, although it arguably didn’t actually top the pre-show Cruiserweight event. T.J. Perkins gets in some great spots, including a suicide dive and a few jumps off the top rope. Both men have done better, but they’ve also done worse. The ending, though, is a bit strange, something that seems to have been a common theme tonight. Brian Kendrick fakes an injury, and it totally fools Perkins, who walks over to check on his friend and is promptly betrayed. Has Perkins literally never watched a wrestling match before? Isn’t he supposed to be a super fan? How dumb do you have to be to fall for this, the oldest trick in the book? And what was the point of the setup of Brian Kendrick asking T.J. Perkins to let him win if that didn’t factor into this whatsoever?

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Stars


The New Day (Big E, Kofi Kingston and/or Xavier Woods) (c) vs. Cesaro and Sheamus (WWE Raw Tag Team Championship)

Reactions: This was a solid outing from everyone involved, though it definitely does seem that the WWE is struggling to stretch out The New Day’s title reign. What we get is sort of a compromise where the audience can now take Cesaro and Sheamus more seriously, and they come out looking strong, even though The New Day remains the champions. In terms of spots, the highlight is definitely Sheamus jumping from the top rope and landing on all three members of The New Day at once. It also remains entertaining to see Cesaro and Sheamus bicker, including one moment when each man continues to spitefully tag his teammate out. But having The New Day win by disqualification is a strange conclusion, particularly when there seems to be absolutely no reason Kofi Kingston was compelled to brawl with Sheamus outside of the ring. This feels like one of those cases where it was decided that Cesaro and Sheamus would win but The New Day would retain, and the WWE struggled to write an ending that lead to that place, so what we got is a bit awkward. Still, not a bad match by any means.

Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars


Sasha Banks (c) vs. Charlotte (Hell in a Cell Match for the WWE Raw Women’s Championship)

Reactions: Finally, we get to the main main event, the much hyped, history-making battle between Sasha Banks and Charlotte. The result is…underwhelming. The first sign that things aren’t quite going as planned comes a few minutes in, when Charlotte starts climbing the cage. This immediately gets the entire crowd hyped out of their minds, as we’ve all seen enough Hell in a Cell matches to know what this leads to. Then Sasha starts climbing too, only for Charlotte to come down and Sasha to very awkwardly seem to intentionally get herself onto Charlotte’s shoulders so she could be thrown down into the table. In the end, the whole climbing the cage thing ends up being kind of pointless. If Sasha hitting the table was the end goal, it’s kind of a strangely executed way of getting there.

What follows is a legitimately excellent work that had all of Twitter going absolutely wild for several minutes. As is often the case with her, Sasha lands quite badly on that table to the point that it would be believable if it really hurt her. Still, we assume she’s fine, and when she starts limping away, this is probably just the millionth example tonight of a superstar selling an injury. But then Sasha collapses onto the ground, medical officials are called in, and this all goes on for an incredibly long time. We soon start doubting our assumption that this is part of the show, because if it’s scripted, would they really devote so much time to this? There’s a solid 60 seconds there where it dawns on the whole audience that we might actually not get to see the main event tonight. Sasha begins to be taken away on the stretcher, but after Charlotte is about to be declared champion, we breathe a sigh of relief as Sasha gets up and runs into the cage. The swerve leads to a huge pop, and we’re actually filled with more excitement for the “real” match than we were before this whole ordeal started. It’s like we have a greater appreciation for it after it was briefly taken away.

Unfortunately, this was the highlight, and it was mostly downhill from there. In part, this match is just a victim of hype of a bad booking. Coming after the Universal Championship match, it’s disappointing, and after Mick Foley spent about 10 minutes talking about how this was going to be the single most violent and horrible thing to ever happen in the history of mankind and how it would leave physical and mental scars on both superstars for the rest of their lives, the match…wasn’t actually that much more violent than a typical match between these two women. Their SummerSlam brawl, which happened just two months ago, was way more painful to watch.

Not only that, but there were some pretty bad botches here, the most obvious one being when Sasha was thrown into a table and it didn’t even break. This was so horrible and so blatantly a mistake that the audience actually started booing. It seems like this was probably intended to be the end of the match, but since the table didn’t break, Sasha and Charlotte had to improvise, and the result was a poor final few minutes. All in all, the match was far from a complete disaster by any means, but it certainly did not live up to the hype, and it’s far from the best either of these incredibly talented performers have shown us even just this year alone. Never did the actual match meet the excitement of the setup, and it was seriously dragged down by some awful botches and a bad ending.

Rating: 2 out of 5 Stars


Match of the Night

Kevin Owens vs. Seth Rollins!


Final Verdict

One can’t help but imagine a version of this pay-per-view where there was only one Hell in a Cell match. This whole “three main events” nonsense was completely ridiculous; here we have a pay-per-view where nearly half of the matches are considered to be the “main” one. How does that work? It just makes each seem less special, and speaking of that, having three Hell in a Cell matches was probably not the best decision. We’ve gone from a Hell in a Cell being something that occurred once in a while and under extreme circumstances to something that occurs three times in a single night. In the third main event, when the cell is lowering down on Sasha and Charlotte, we’re meant to be nervous and excited, as if this is some huge moment and we’re thinking, “Oh man, it’s about to get real.” But that’s kind of undermined by the fact that we’ve already seen this exact same cell in action two other times tonight. It’s certainly admirable that the WWE gave their women this opportunity and had Sasha Banks and Charlotte perform in the main event – something that should definitely happen again in the future – but unfortunately, in this case, that match could not top the Universal Championship competition. The end result is a decent pay-per-view with some excellent matches, some decent ones, one horrible one, a lot of really questionable writing decisions, and a whole bunch of baffling endings.


Final Score: 2.5 out of 5 Stars

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