AEW All Out – live thoughts

I’m catching this show a day late and have so far avoided almost all commentary of any kind and all substantive spoilers. Here’s a repeatedly updated post as I make my way through it.

• The opening promo package was well-produced, but it’s discouraging to hear this screamy rage-rock soundtrack. It’s one of the elements that WWE seems to have permanently anchored to 1998, and an area where AEW could’ve immediately differentiated themselves.
• First match is SCU vs Jurassic Express. I love Luchasaurus but I don’t like people (and promotions) having to pretend a guy is really a dinosaur. The camera shakes, SCU selling fright — that’s kind of lame. Why can’t he just be a real guy dressed as a dinosaur?
• There’s something about the production of AEW’s hard camera that makes it look like there’s a light haze in the arena, which really reminds me of WCW.
• I would go easy on the commentary saying SCU has a combined 64 years of experience. To me that falls on the wrong side of the “celebrating a career” vs “these guys are old” line.
• Surprised they’re going to Omega-PAC so early in the show.
• Another thing AEW needs to fix is the quality of their music going to the audio feed. It sounds like we’re just getting the audio from the arena sometimes, and not well-mic’ed at that. It makes the experience of watching on TV so much less immersive. WWE does a great job of mixing the entrance themes well so that you hear them in full quality.
• Great match between PAC and Omega, even with some botched spots. They’re both big enough pros to cover for those mistakes. Kind of surprised by the finish; at some point they’re going to need to protect Omega, and hopefully that’s soon.
• Darby Allin looks like he didn’t finish his makeup before the match.
• This three-way garbage match is embarrassing. They’re spending all this time on this awful chair-tape-tacks scene and nothing is really going right. Allin and Janella both appear to have never used tape before. Havoc kept his thumbtack-filled mouth taped shut for like 10 minutes until he needed the opportunity to spit tacks.
• Ok, so I wonder if maybe I’ve just never watched good garbage matches; I actually ended up finding myself enjoying that and getting into the finish. In spite of that, I would still rather never see another of these matches ever.
• The Dark Order vs Best Friends match was going strong until the lame interference at the end. They need to be careful with the over-orchestrated stuff, because if they don’t completely nail it, it comes off super fake and super lame.
• When JR does things like repeatedly ask who Orange Cassidy is, it doesn’t seem like he’s advancing stories — it just seems like their lead announcer doesn’t know their roster.
• The Women’s title match qualifier match was disappointing. Lots of overly choreographed spots that took too long to set up and just made the whole thing feel disjointed. I would’ve put Shida over Riho in a heartbeat. Riho’s size definitely makes her feel like an underdog, but she really needed carrying and even then, her offense felt very unbelievable. As JR said, “the crowd is respectfully cheering this young lady.”
• Not at all impressed by the presentation of Shawn Spears. The whole idea of Spears in AEW has been based on the idea that WWE didn’t see the potential in this guy and his ability to just be a good old-fashioned straightforward heel. The “Road to All Out” promos emphasized that, and I was impressed with how quickly they turned him into a believable heel. And then the guy comes out in gimmicky white contact lenses and flashes his “10” fingers.
• I’m not kidding, I’d cut the guy right now for nothing more than flashing the “10.” Either you’re a different guy than they saw in WWE or you aren’t. If you call back to your “Perfect 10” / Tye Dillinger gimmick, then rather than saying AEW has invested in untapped talent, you’re saying AEW has invested in a WWE cast-off. Just so terribly tone-deaf and pathetic.
• It’s especially unfortunate because I feel like he did a pretty decent job in this match.
• Glad Cody went over clean, and I was also really impressed with how over he was with the crowd.
• The Young Bucks have to be the most easily hatable act in pro wrestling. I go through the incessant flip-flop between seeing their faces and listening to them talk (HATE) and then watching them wrestle (OK NOT SO BAD).
• This match was probably my least favorite of their series with the Lucha Bros; just way too fake with too many overly choreographed spots. They’re really capable of telling good stories in their matches (the match at Double or Nothing was so good) but this was just disjointed spot after spot. You could tell by the crowd reaction — eruption followed by total silence; there is no investment in a story, just response to spots. It feels like half the match involves a Lucha Bro holding the hand of a Buck so that they can do some fancy dance move anchored on outstretched arms. The other half of the match is somebody diving through or over the ropes onto someone waiting to catch them.
• I much prefer the style of (most of) the Best Friends / Dark Order match. I really hope teams like War Machine and the Revival can make their way to AEW in the coming years, and that AEW lasts long enough for those teams to join them. I’d love for AEW to have a legit tag division and not just a tag division built to feed the Bucks for spotfests.
• I was just about to write “at least the crowd isn’t chanting ‘this is awesome'” but then they chanted ‘fight forever,’ which is probably worse.
• Ok, here’s “this is awesome.” No investment in the story at all, because there’s no story to invest in. This isn’t two teams trying to win the titles, it’s two teams trying to perform every ladder and table stunt they can think of.
• The Young Bucks are in a ladder match, where the goal is to climb a ladder and retrieve the titles … so they double-team Pentagon in a two-man submission hold — where submissions won’t win the match — and leave Fenix unattended. This is stupid.
• That said, that was a great mini-story of Whichever Jackson ripping off the mask and then the Bros destroying him in return.
• I like this secret team beating up on the Young Bucks more.
• Cool, glad to see LAX officially coming to AEW (even if it looks like they’re not going to get to use the LAX name). I know that was the rumor, but you still never know if WWE are going to outbid until you see them on TV.
• I really like AEW’s preproduced promos. This is an area where I think they’ve really found their own style and differentiated themselves from WWE without being reactionary.
• I legit laughed out loud at Hangman Page’s entrance. Glad the horse is behaving better than Cody’s dog. I think Page’s “cowboy” gimmick needs to be a little less overt. It comes off like a goofy costume (probably because it is a goofy costume).
• Jericho’s entrance was pretty strong and he seemed way more like a star than Adam “I’m dressed up for my 8th birthday party” Page.
• Really curious which way they’ll go here — I can see both cases. They want to make a clear statement that they’re not WWE and they have their own stars, so you want to build around Page. But on the other hand, Page has definitely cooled off this summer and maybe you want to go with the known commodity to start with.
• Also Fozzy is terrible but this isn’t a bad song! Definitely the best Fozzy song I’ve ever heard.
• Ok, I was on the fence about JR, but after “Jericho looks to be in the best shape I’ve seen him in years,” I’m now convinced he’s lost all credibility.
• I’m actually a little disappointed the crowd is chanting for Jericho; he does such great heel work, even though he’s so entertaining. Give the man what he’s working for!
• Jericho is so good.
• I forgot to write it at the time, but I noticed a little while ago that they fixed that hazy image issue I wrote about early in the show. It’s much sharper with much better contrast now, and the production looks great.
• This is such a WWE-style story, going overboard on positioning the face as fighting through an injury, and it’s just a bad fit for this matchup. Page is going after the loud and bombastic Jericho, and people don’t want to cheer for a weakened and wounded underdog; in this situation, they want an ass-kicker who will shut up the whiny braggart. It’s like how fans just wanted to see Becky Lynch destroy Ronda Rousey, and that’s where the money was, yet WWE just kept throwing lame things like Becky’s injuries in the way to build sympathy that no one needed.
• Page getting tough with the ref is not a good look.
• Let’s do a double-turn!
• The production team is getting some great shots showing off the size of the crowd.
• This match needed Jericho getting tough with the ref; he was starting to get too sympathetic and Page was coming off a little nasty. Unless they want the double turn, which I don’t think they do, that spat needed to happen.
• Jericho’s counters and reversals in this match have been great.
• Glad to see the crowd so into the near-fall of Jericho barely kicking out of the Deadeye.
• That match was long and slow with some really plodding segments, but somehow felt very appropriate for the story being told and I was totally cool with the pace. It wasn’t like a Triple H match that feels like “Come on, get this over with.” I really liked how Jericho’s counter of the Discus Punch with the Judas Effect fit so perfectly with the story of Page’s repeated reuse of the move and Jericho’s established ability to scout and counter Page’s offense. That was a really nice touch there, and they did a good job of moving out of the earlier WWE style for the majority of the match.

Overall I’d say this was a fine show, but I really felt like it needed to be better than fine. I’m one of those people who is absolutely guilty of judging AEW based on what I wanted it to be, and I wanted it to basically be an American version of New Japan, where everything is more sports-like and treated more authentically. I loved Double or Nothing and thought it was an amazing show, but over the course of the summer, it’s clear that that’s not what this promotion is.

I mentioned to Doom DeLuise that this feels like a promotion trying to do an alternate version of what WWE does rather than a promotion doing its own thing, and added that NXT feels more different from main-roster WWE than AEW does. Everything they’re doing feels rooted in a template that WWE created, and if that’s all they’re going to be, I have little hope for this promotion. If you’re just trying to do what WWE does, you’re not going to overtake WWE — it’s that simple. It’s unfortunate, because this is probably the last well-funded competitor to WWE we’re ever going to see.