This was a Last Man Standing Match for Triple H’s World Heavyweight Title.
True to form, they follow a more simplistic and pared down match with some real bullshit. They go right into punching and fill a few minutes of space with Shawn working the knee before going outside and abandoning that pretty immediately. Shawn misses a dive and goes through the table. He recovers enough to fiddle with something near his head before the camera quickly cuts away, and by the time it comes back, he’s bleeding. Must have slipped out of his hands and across his forehead, very unfortunate accident. This then becomes one of the worst match types in wrestling at this time, The Passion of the Shawn. He bleeds buckets and keeps falling down and over himself and barely making his comebacks, before collapsing again. It all feels very fake because the only way he ever knows how to sell anything is that he’s about on death’s door. While it’s a shame that the door never opens, it gets harder and harder to believe. It doesn’t relate to the match entirely either, but there’s always something so annoying about the crutches that these two are allowed to have that nobody ever else seems to really get at the time.
Hunter’s work on the cut is fine, but pretty limited. Triple H also gets busted open, but the camera at least covers for his bladejob much better than they did for Michaels. He comes back quicker than Shawn did after bleeding, which can maybe be covered up by saying Shawn was already suffering from blood loss, but it’s definitely another one of those real borderline little touches where the only point seems to be getting over that Triple H is the toughest and strongest, despite being scripted as the top bad guy. They both bleed a lot and lie around in between casually sort of trading big offense. Last Man Standing is the worst (well, second worst…third worst?) stipulation for these two to have. They’re two guys who are guilty of just lying still for long periods of time and calling it selling, and no stipulatiion encourages that sort of behavior like this does. Last Man Standing is one of the better WWE stipulations, but what it really does is hold a magnifying glass up to who wrestlers really are, and these are two bad, lazy, and unimaginative wrestlers.
I’ve had relative praise for their two more pared down efforts, but those weren’t especially interesting matches so much as they were well done formula matches. This match allows the potential for so much more, and they just used it to do a very normal match, with a little more blood and much more lying around. In addition to being wasteful and sort of disdainfully normal, it feels strangely behind the times too. You can look at something like the inaugural Last Man Standing match in the company (Mankind vs. The Rock) almost five years prior, or even Triple H’s own Last Man Standing Match with Chris Jericho in the past, and they did infinitely more with it. Those were still fairly restrained matches, but they were matches with focus and far more interesting offensive ideas. Those were also match ups that have happened a lot, and those LMS matches felt like departures from what they were usually doing. This was another Hunter vs. Shawn match, just without pinfalls, and using buckets of blood as a prop to try and do the narrative work that they’re too lazy and intellectually bankrupt to accomplish themselves.
With no fan excitement for the feud but it needing to happen again, because fuck you, they needed to drum something up this time. They slapped a Last Man Standing label on their usual bullshit and like the stipulations in the Three Stages of Hell match, they just treated it with contempt and worked around it rather than within it. It’s an incredibly odd trend for two guys who have had more influence on their booking than all but a few in wrestling history without actually having the pencil in their hands.
HANDWERK 