Featured image by @y2IlSJmIUJ3254
This review was commissioned by Marlowe over on my Ko-fi account.
There’s a lot of romance to El Desperado and Jun Kasai. They seem well aware of this fact too. The emotional highs of their 2022 deathmatch still echo three years later, and it’s at the forefront of the presentation for this IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship match. Roses feature prominently here, Kasai brings out a board strapped down with lighttubes and roses, Despy has his own bouquet of black roses as well. The match is even subtitled “I’m so glad I met you.” All of this points to the natural emotional conclusion of the 2022 bout–these two are important to each other and their respective legacies.
The problem with that is there’s nowhere left to take the emotional dynamic. There’s just no topping that 2022 bout, the post-match promo, the sheer feeling of it all. Despy’s already overcome the old master, there’s no more threads left to knot.
All these two can really rely upon is the action.
In that sense, there’s a certain sense of grandeur and escalation to this bout in comparison to the first. There’s more glass, for one, completely covering the ring by the halfway point. Kasai brings out a ladder which provides us multiple big, showy bumps. But there’s a certain hollowness to a lot of this. The bigger setpieces means that more time is dedicated to setting up big spots than actually building anticipation or working towards them. And the spots themselves, while an escalation from the first bout, are about as standard deathmatch fare as you’re bound to get in the 2020s. None of this is uncommon to the genre, none of it especially gnarly in either execution or concept.
The rhythm just isn’t the same too. The first half is a little more back and forth than I like, and it lacks a certain spark of urgency and excitement that Kasai and Despy are typically much better at creating. Instead, it feels more like there’s a sense of comfortable play here–two buds doing what they enjoy leading to a fairly frictionless confrontation.
Some of that old magic does start to peak its head through in the final moments. At a certain point, cool violence is still cool violence, and my monkey brain isn’t immune to the charms of shoot headbutts and big crashes. Even the final stretch of big ole main event nearfalls ignites the flames a little, just because there’s finally a sense of real danger of things ending.
A more muted reprise to one of the decade’s best matches than first meets the eye. Maybe they’ll nail it again in 2035.
Rating: ***½
