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[1999-12-12-WWF-Armageddon] HHH vs Vince McMahon


Loss

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  • 3 weeks later...

Last few minutes. They actually went 30 minutes with this match, which is insane, so no way were we going to include it in full. There's good sports entertainment melodrama, and then there's overwrought and bad sports entertainment melodrama, and this is the latter. Vince is about to destroy HHH with a sledgehammer for the finish when Stephanie asks if she can do it. She can't bring herself to do it, but that leaves Vince open for a pinfall and loss. So HHH wins.

 

Then comes the twist that we're still feeling the effects of today. HHH teases hitting Stephanie with the sledgehammer until she turns around concerned, and her concern turns to a smile and she hugs HHH. Yeah, a lot of how they got there didn't make sense, but this was another great angle that further cemented HHH as the top guy.

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  • 11 months later...
  • 2 years later...

I can't imagine watching this for 30 minutes but the action we see isn't offensively bad or anything. In a shocking twist, they do NOT have Stephanie pick up the sledgehammer, prepare to hit HHH, then swing around and hit Vince instead. Instead she costs Vince the match through more subtle means and solidifies her turn afterward. And things will never be the same again.

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  • GSR changed the title to [1999-12-12-WWF-Armageddon] HHH vs Vince McMahon
  • 6 years later...

Watched this in full recently for my blog and...it's not good. 

- The brawling is decent, but nothing special and actually exposes just how important Vince's foils were over the years to carry him to things resembling good matches. With Austin in the cage, they threw in a ton of high spots that were fresh for their time and lots of booking obstacles for the Rattlesnake to overcome. With Hogan and Shawn, you had guys who really knew how to play to the live crowds and were also willing and able to have bloodbaths with Vince that played to the super popular babyface/super hated heel dynamic well. Here, it just doesn't work. Vince wasn't/isn't a sympathetic babyface then, now, forever, so you're not really rooting for him. Triple H dominating the match is fine, but like any other Triple H match where he dominates, it's not exactly riveting stuff. Nor is it inventive or creative or innovative at any time.

- I get that the overall storyline and angle was a big one and that you can't get too nitpicky with Stephanie's heel turn...but there was a better way to do it. What the story should've been was that Triple H, by going the lengths he would go to in order to be the Champion and keep Stephanie as his bride, had proven to her that he loved her. Instead, we get Stephanie pretending (?) to be crying and worrying about her father during a 30-minute streetfight only to screw him at the last possible moment after also seeing her husband - whose side she was on all along - also go through all sorts of punishment (which she was visibly and repeatedly cheering for). It just made no sense the way it played out and, when you're invested in a 30-minute match, it's much worse than watching a 2-minute clip of it and thinking about it hindsight. 

- Finally, as noted earlier, this was a lot of mid brawling and some really lame backstage stuff involving cars to give a "cinematic" feel because that was just what the WWE was doing at the time. I'm not a fan of it now and wasn't then either. Its borderline "If you can run over a guy with a car, why not just bring a gun to the ring?" territory for me where the very limited confines of what pro-wrestling is have been stretched so beyond recognition that it's no longer grounded in even the thinnest accepted reality. Also, again, had Triple H killed Vince, would that have also been part of Stephanie's plan all along? 

This match was seemingly scripted by Vince saying, "We'll do some garbage to start, then we'll do more garbage in the stands, then you'll try to run me over a car, then we'll somehow get back in the arena and I'll take a big fall into some crash pads, and then we'll get back in the ring and Steph will turn," and the problem is, none of the moments felt organic or suspenseful or fresh. Even with all these bells and whistles, this match was just super boring. 

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