The SmarK 24/7 Runt for WWE Vengeance 2003

PPVs, Reviews

Not a rant, just a runt.

At any rate, I didn’t have a DVD copy of this one, so I checked it out again on 24/7 while recording it, and god DAMN this was a hell of a show and quite the debut for Smackdown’s brand-exclusive PPVs. One nice thing is that 24/7 is now splitting up 3 hour shows into two parts, from the looks of it, to prevent the video problems that plagued Wrestlemanias III and V recently, and that’s fine with me.

I think the interesting thing for me about this show was how bang-on my initial reactions to it were, because I pretty much rated everything the same on this go-around, four years after watching it for the first time. That doesn’t usually happen too often. Eddie v. Benoit in the US title finals was still a **** match with a shitty ending that didn’t lead to anything useful, Undertaker v. Cena was still a ***1/2 brawl with the wrong guy going over (and boy, has hindsight shown that Cena should have gone over here), Zach Gowen is still worthless, the tag title match with Haas & Benjamin v. The Filthy Animals was still a lost masterpiece at ****1/4, and the main event three-way was a **** affair that showed that Kurt Angle and Brock Lesnar was gold.

It got me thinking, though — remembering the dull Cena v. Lesnar match that stunk up the midcard of Backlash 2003, if Brock came back today and got booked in a main event feud with Cena (which would be likely), that would be not only one HELL of a match, but probably a much different outcome and attitude as well.

A very, very interesting show with three ****+ matches = Catch it on 24/7 if you’ve never seen it before.

Read the full Vengeance 2003 Rant!