Review – All Out

As with last year All Out is the companion/follow up show to All In. All In 2024 had some truly magical wrestling moments and angles that would be impossible to top just two weeks later, so the goal here is to just put on a good show that doesn’t kill any of the momentum from Wembly stadium. Did they succeed? Let’s find out!

Daniel Garcia vs MJF

Garcia jumped MJF instead of doing his usual entrance, and was all over him for the first couple of minutes. Little things like that matter; MJF put Garcia out of action for two months so the last thing he should have done was treat this like a proper sporting contest. MJF would eventually get the drop on him and take over. They would eventually trade the advantage until Garcia got busted open, and they both started going for big moves to finish the other one off. Very good opener; it had the proper amount of energy and violence for a grudge match to open a show. Lots of good counters to submissions late in the match, too. Contrary to what I saw on social media I very much dug the finish. MJF winning with a low blow in true heel fashion was perfect in my opinion. Post match MJF tried to sucker punch Garcia but Danny sniffed it out and left MJF laying in the ring after a top rope piledriver. This was a huge coming out party for Garcia, whose contract is up soon and AEW hopes to re-sign, and if they can lock him down he can a real star for them in the future. Great opener.

AEW Tag Team Title Match: The Young Bucks (c) vs The Blackpool Combat Club

The Club is represented here by Claudio and Wheeler Yuta. Not much to say here. It was fine, we knew the Bucks weren’t losing, it is what it is. Anyone who knows me knows that I am no fan of the Bucks, so this is about the best you’re gonna see me say about them. The match only took place to have all four of these guys in the building to get involved in the World Title match later, if we’re going to be honest, and could have been shaved down to 10 minutes instead of going 15.

AEW International Title: Will Ospreay (c) vs PAC

Another banger from Ospreay to add to his collection for 2024. I was a full on Ospreay hater before this year because to me he did way too much than was ever necessary. Having watched him a lot this year, let me say that I still think he does too much, but of all the ‘does too much’ gang he is clearly head and shoulders above all the rest and is so talented at it that it’s hard not to dig what he’s doing even if it’s not your style of ring work. As much as I have dumped on Ospreay and his style of wrestling in the past, watching his PPV matches this year have started to change my mind on him a bit. Why? For one, his stuff looks good when he does it. He’s toned down the theatrics a bit and it looks a lot less like an overchoreographed dance routine than it used to. Now it looks more like a good fight scene from a magic powered Kung Fu movie (I mean that as a compliment, not a dis). As for this match, yeah they did too much but they did it all well and all looked like it hurt. But if you’re into this kind of thing then it was 4 stars, 5 stars, whatever your scale is.

Chicago Street Fight: Willow Nightengale vs Kris Statlander

Show stealing match here. Willow gets big points from me for not wearing her usual ring gear to what’s supposed to be a, you know, street fight. But ok, how good was the match? For me, when it comes to these matches here’s the difference between good and bad: can you keep it within the boundaries of what makes for a good fight between enemies, or do you take into being a stunt show where you stack tables and chairs on top of each other just for the hell of it, while the other person lays there and waits for you to do it when they could be stopping you like a logical person would? Thankfully here we did not have that problem. They beat each other up real good, landed some good shots on each other, and when they went to a table spot or to use a weapon it made sense and didn’t at all feel gratuitous. For all the fanfare with Mercedes Mone and the praise the Toni Storm and Mariah May have received, Willow has one of the major reasons behind the vast improvement in the AEW Women’s division this year. And it was on display here in what I think was one of the best women’s matches of the year in any company.

Continental Title Match: Kazuchika Okada (c) vs Orange Cassidy vs Mark Briscoe vs Konosuke Takeshita

This was a fun match, everyone got all their stuff in. The big moment was the brief face off between Okada and Takeshita in a tease of what will be a huge matchup between the one time Ace of New Japan and a guy who could definitely hold that spot in the future. This match ultimately existed on this card for that tease and to get Orange Cassidy a match, I guess. It was fine for what it was and thankfully it didn’t overstay it’s welcome at just over 15 minutes.

TBS Title Match: Mercedes Mone (c) vs Hikaru Shida

I’m of two minds when it comes to Mercedes run in AEW. On the one hand, there’s been a lot of stuff, mainly promo segments, that you could call mid or just plain bad. At the same time if you’re being even slightly objective you have to see that there’s a corner of the IWC that is projecting failure onto every thing she does because they just don’t like her. Those people very much want to see her go down in flames and walk out in disgust so they can be proven right about everything they say about her, and are waiting with bated breath for the day she’s asked to do a job and doesn’t want to. Her reception from AEW fans in the various arenas has been anywhere from lukewarm to hostile, so making her a heel was the best way to go. The terminally online AEW core audience knows that she’s a mercenary in an era where it’s common for wrestlers to publicly pledge their undying love for their employer and treats her as such, it is what it is.

OK so what about this match? It was….fine. We all knew Shida had zero chance of winning. A month ago they’d just had a match on Dynamite that was……fine, and won by Mercedes so there wasn’t a whole lot to anticipate here. Kamille, the Diesel to Mercedes Shawn Michaels, was barred from ringside, in a move that was supposed to inject some hope for a Shida victory but did no such thing. The better choice in my opinion would have been to get someone Mercedes hadn’t faced yet like Deonna Purazzo or Thunder Rosa here instead.

The closing minutes were a muddled mess; Shida hit her with three Falcon Arrows and her finisher just for Mercedes to push her off at 1 and roll out of the ring. Mercedes won clean after 16 minutes that should have been 10 or 12, which begged the question of what was the point of banning Kamille from ringside? The cheating heel champion is ultimately supposed to find a new way to cheat after having their usual method taken away, so to just have her win clean anyway was confusing and deflating just like her victory at All In.

Matches like this where the result was never in doubt should be used to get more heat on your heel champion. With Kamille banned from ringside why not have one of the Elite, who Mercedes has been palling around with backstage on Dynamite, interfere on her behalf? Okada, who has been making (kayfabe) googly eyes at her in all of their segments together, bailing her out was a quick and easy fix that had already been set up on television! This was not the time for an overlong match with no suspense as to who was winning to end on a flat finish. Just bad booking all around here.

AEW World Title Match: Bryan Danielson (c) vs Jack Perry

Danielson has been doing some of the best work of his career this year, and it showed here. This was 27 minutes of Bryan showing how he can get a good match out of damn near anybody in the world. Jack Perry is the walking embodiment of ‘he’s not that guy’ in that there is no time you come away from anything he does thinking that ‘yeah, this guy is a big star in the making’. And yet, they keep trying to make him one. He’s not inept in the ring but he doesn’t do anything in such a way that makes you want to watch more of him. Here he was a perfectly fine stand-in for a generic Bryan Danielson opponent in that he was able to do all the stuff Bryan led him to do so they could have a good match. But he’s not a good enough performer to get anyone to believe he had a shot at winning this. And at 27 minutes this was too damn long; 20 would have more than sufficed here.

The real story to this match was the Blackpool Combat Club turning on Bryan, complete with Jon Moxley going back to the 1989 Terry Funk/Ric Flair plastic bag choking spot. Chicago chanting ‘that’s a murder’ was…….interesting if nothing else. I did like how they faked us out just before, with Mox and the gang first emerging to thwart Christian Cage from cashing in his Money in the Bank, oops I mean Casino Gauntlet contract before they made the turn.

Lights Out Cage Match: Swerve Strickland vs Hangman Page

OK I watched the first 10 minutes of this and it was good and violent the way you would expect this kind of thing to be. I fell asleep, and then woke up to reports of things like cinder block spots, unprotected chair shots, and a syringe injection going on and said no thanks to watching it back to see for myself. The arson angle from the previous Dynamite was the thing that finally got me interested in watching these two face off, but I do not regret missing most of the actual match given what happened. Sorry folks, that type of stuff just isn’t for me. And 30 minutes is too long for my tastes here given that this was a ‘two guys trying to kill each other’ match.

FINAL GRADE: B-

Matches: B-, Finishes: C, Swerves/Surprises: C, Storylines: A, Pacing: C

Despite my many criticisms I did think this was overall a pretty good show! The only match that was a skip going in for was the Bucks tag team match, and afterwards even the matches that did too much for my tastes were in the wheelhouse for AEW’s core audience. I’ll even go as far as to say the watch/skip ratio was better here than at All In, even though the high points on that show were much higher than those here. The biggest thing is that after watching this show I’ll be back for the next one.