This was for Benoit’s World Heavyweight Title.
Another rematch that doesn’t live up to the original. There’s not any fun interesting reason for it, it’s just not all that interesting or good. The most “interesting” thing about the match is in Chris Benoit’s hometown entrance, where his weird still-alive son David and Benoit’s dad go nuts for him in the front row, and it’s all skin crawlingly weird.
The match itself is frustratingly normal. Triple H and Shawn are no longer on their best behavior, as the right guess is again made that this absolutely doesn’t matter. This exists to fill space and run a PPV main event without actually doing anything. As such, they spend a lot of the match not doing much. As such, they reveal the perfect time and perfect place effect of the match at WrestleMania, and how much was carried both by the moment and by the question of if the moment would ever come. This is worked a lot smaller, and you can very clearly mark the lack of effort Hunter and Shawn put forward by the fact that they don’t bleed. If they gave a shit, they’d bleed, because that’s code at this point for them thinking a match is important. Lack of effort wouldn’t be half as upsetting here if the match didn’t now go half an hour either. Lots of time to fill with either repeat spots or obviously lazy work. Benoit is Benoit, but the focus again is really just on Hunter and Shawn, and he could be anyone. Finish is all about them again, as Benoit makes Shawn tap out to the Sharpshooter, but after he’s in it for like a minute and a half, and just in time for Hunter to start to crawl in and to where they’re fingertips apart. Christ.
The hook is supposed to be that Benoit is super popular here in his hometown and that Shawn is a villain in Canada, but he was already super popular in MSG, with both Shawn and Hunter getting treated poorly by the crowd there too, so nothing about this is all that different besides how two-thirds of the match no longer saw fit to put in the effort.
HANDWERK 