This match isn’t good. But I do think there’s a version it that works, maybe just with a much better wrestler than Joey Janela. You can see it in flashes, but here it never quite comes together.

When the spots hit, they look great. The John Woo dropkick into the light tubes Janela is holding is a great visual (most likely because it genuinely fucked up Janelas arm), and there are a handful of moments like that scattered throughout. The problem is that none of them really matter. Big ideas come and go without consequence. A Razor’s Edge through light tubes lands early and is almost immediately brushed off. A superplex off the ladder through chairs and tubes looks brutal, but both men are back up soon after, moving on like it never happened. The violence is there, but the weight behind it isn’t.

That’s the issue that hangs over the entire match. There’s no sense of escalation because everything is treated the same. Light tubes break constantly, shots are exchanged, and neither man really sells in a way that makes anything feel different from what came before. Janela taking a bundle of tubes to the head and immediately firing up, only for Takeda to do the same soon after, sums it up pretty well. The match becomes a loop of impact without consequence.

There are also moments where it drifts into things that don’t quite fit. The scissors-based offense feels more awkward than effective, especially when there are better, more natural ways to create that kind of visual. There’s also a random fighting spirit exchange built around german suplexes that feels completely out of place. It’s the kind of spot that’s meant to carry weight (at some point long ago before it was overdone to death), but here it just comes off like cheap imitation with very little purpose.

Even the finishing stretch, which should be the payoff, doesn’t fully land. The near falls get reactions from the crowd, but it feels more like a conditioned response than something the match has actually earned. Without the groundwork, those moments don’t have much to stand on beyond the expectation that they should matter.

There are good ideas here, and some of the visuals are genuinely strong. The light tubes look and sound great, and in isolation, a lot of these spots would hold up. But as a complete match, it never finds its footing. It ends up feeling like a collection of clips rather than a cohesive whole, something that might play better in short gifs than it does over its full runtime.

A hollow husk of a dream match concept that ends up looking closer to a nightmare.

2 Stars