MLJ: Rush vs Negro Casas 5: Atlantis, Rush, Titán vs Felino, Mr. Niebla, Negro Casas

aired 2014-04-20
taped 2014-04-20 @ Arena México
Atlantis, Rush, Titán vs Felino, Mr. Niebla, Negro Casas



We're going with the dailymotion link on this. The youtube one has some pre-match promos but my three years of high school Spanish don't cut it, so we'll go with the longer version with the entrances. I kind of wanted to compare the two to see what cuts happened, but I don't have time for that. Anyway, we're on match number Five now, which doesn't even count what happened before the Shocker hair match, and I do think some of the chinks are starting to show.

Wrestling in front of the same crowd every week is hard. That's why so many of these guys are so good. First and foremost, it's probably because they start so young, so that even someone like Rush, who is only 25, has been at it for at least seven years. It's not just that length of experience, though, but the depth of it. You go out week in and week out and have to manage three falls, three finishes, two transitions, a reset or two, switching up structure and form and where and when you pop the crowd, all the while, working some real greats... well, you get good. That said, it's hard. It HAS to be hard. There are only so many narrative possibilities and there are three fall matches up and down the card, and in all of them, they're full of match ups that happen dozens and dozens of times where they have to keep the interest and draw the crowd back over a span of months if not years. I tend to try to watch on as much of a weekly basis as possible, because, to me, context means so much. It means that you start to see the chinks, yes, but also patterns of brilliance that you might not notice otherwise.

La Pesta Negra was one of my favorite things in my first few months of lucha watching. Everything from that bouncy music to how much fun they seemed to be having to Zacarias, all of it seemed welcoming to someone new to lucha. A little went a long way though. I think at this point I much prefer Casas and one of the two but not the other. When you get both Felino and Niebla in there, unless we're looking at a comedy match against people like Porky or Maximo or Marco, the match will suffer from their antics. It's almost impossible to tell a serious story with these jokers, which is fine, don't get me wrong. I like comedy as much as the next guy, but maybe not in the midst of these Rush and Negro Casas exchanges.

Here, though, it worked, and early on, I really didn't think it would. First off, there was a certain amount of aggression to the rudos. With both Rush and Titan on the tecnico side, they had a bit more impetus to be rudos and not de facto faces. For the primera that meant anytime one of their opponents, especially Rush, started to fight back, one would leave their battered sparring partner behind and start a double-team to cut it off. I really love that sort of organic flow in matches. It's a lot more interesting to me than guys just standing outside and leaning on the apron while their partners get mangled. I like at least an attempt to fight back in the beatdown and it existed here, only to be smartly halted. Later on Rush would fight back against all three rudos only to get overpowered which really made both him and them look good. It's the little things.

More, than that, though, they were able to channel some of the gross comedy schtick into something productive. So far as I can tell so far, Lucha, like all forms of wrestling but somehow more so, is all about anticipation and payoff: the anticipation of the comeback, of the dive, of the captains facing off, of the apuesta stipulation. In this case, they were building to the end of the primera caida but more than that, to the tecnico comeback in the segunda, and part of it was getting heat. When you have Felino and Niebla in there, you have certain tools, namely, the gross body humor and the charisma that fuels it. That was in full play here and it shouldn't have worked to garner heat and build anticipation to the comeback. There's almost too much sick joy to them kicking out Pitty City and touching tongues and whatever else. What made it work here, though, was that they were doing it to Atlantis. I get the idea that the guy is old and that he's been featured for years and years and years but there's a gravity to him that I really buy into as a newer watcher, so the fact that they were humiliating and demeaning him so blatantly sort of raised my hackles a little bit, and if it made me, distanced and dispassionate, feel that way, then it definitely riled the crowd.

Rush is always interesting, but I like him in this transition period, before he started coming out in black and associating with Los Ingobernales first and foremost. Here, he was partnered with Atlantis and Titan, so he couldn't quite rudo it up as much he would in a different setting. I mean, hell, Kemonito came out with his side. That said, he still managed to have the usual fiery exchanges with Casas through all three caidas, including towards the end. This was a match with a lot of Rush and Casas but it didn't feel overwhelming because they did a good job breaking it up and building back to it with the other exchanges. The ultimate highly, though, was Rush pounding Casas on the announce table between falls and then dickishly sitting on the steps. Great stuff. The lowlight on the other hand was the fact that they went, for what I think was the third match in a row, with at least two of them in front of the same crowd, to the Triple Team/Drop kick out of the corner comeback transition by Rush. I understand that it felt like a fresh spot the first time (in as I hadn't seen it done much in the months before, if at all) but they were quickly running it into the ground.

Outside of that, this was another good, fairly straight-forward, showing. I wish that Titan had someone a bit more suited to him to work with, as I haven't seen him much yet. Felino served as a decent base but nothing spectacular. I did like Titan's intensity in the comeback, but it's hard to gauge it too much when the comeback consists of two or three moves. Atlantis was fine and played his role well. He seems to bring out something better in Niebla, though there was way too much late match stooging from our friend with the afro. For those keeping score, this one went to the tecnicos, with Atlantis picking up the fall and leaving Rush to yell victoriously at Casas on the mic post match, only to get suitably mocked for it by the retreating Peste Negra.