WWE Fastlane review: Not brought to you by Pizza Hut

Seth Rollins is still the World Heavyweight Champion.

WWE Fastlane on Saturday ended with Seth Rollins barely hanging on to the World Heavyweight title in a Last Man Standing match that, thanks to his performance, was significantly better than their last match at WWE Payback back in September. Fastlane was a better show than Payback; it opened strongly and ended strongly. Not that anyone will remember this show a week from now, but it’s a defintely a thumbs-up show.

The main event started off slow, with Nakamura in control. Towards the end of his NJPW run, Nakamura had two modes – working his ass off or just kind of going with the vibes. A lot of his WWE run has been the latter, mainly working off of his immense charisma. He was fine here, but it was Rollins’ performance and selling towards the end that really made this match, easily the best match on the show.

Long-term, it seems inevitable that Damian Priest will cash in and defeat Seth Rollins. Announcers in fact questioned how long Rollins can go on this pace he’s going on, so something tells me the cash-in is sooner rather than later.

Fastlane only had four other matches and ended after a brisk three hours. WWE and AEW pay-per-views at this point are like night and day. Here’s the rundown:

• The opening match had the unlikely team of Cody Rhodes and Jey Uso win the Undisputed WWE Tag Team titles, besting The Judgment Day. This turned out to be a hot opener to kick off the show, by far the second best match overall. There was tons of interference towards the end, but it all told a story and the crowd was into it. Even better, it furthered the storyline with The Judgment Day by announcers pointing out everything started to falter once JD McDonagh’s interference backfired.
• The LWO vs. Bobby Lashley/Street Profits match was all about Carlito making his return. People popped big for it. Carlito looked good for the one or two minutes he was in. Can’t call this a failure but the match itself was completely forgettable. Also boy howdy did WWE plug the hell out of Pizza Hut during this match. This show in fact felt like a huge commercial for Pizza Hut. Thanks Nick Khan!
• Can you say that a match was good, but also kind of there at the same time? That was the women’s three-way on this show between IYO SKY, Asuka, and Charlotte Flair. Absolutely nothing wrong with it, but it also felt like every other three-way I’ve ever seen on WWE programming recently. There were no interesting ideas. Does every multi-person match need a tower of doom spot, or a spot where everyone falls to the floor after a big move? No, but you are going to see in a WWE match no matter what. The storyline of the match had IYO telling Bayley before the match not to interfere. So the end of the match had her do it anyway and it helped IYO retain the title. Everyone was happy after the match. Okay. It’s only a matter of time before Charlotte wins that title because THE RECORD MUST BE BROKEN, so do what you gotta do now I guess.
• LA Knight got another big win, teaming with John Cena to defeat Jimmy Uso and Solo Sikoa. This was not particularly interesting for a long stretch of time. It’s easy to see that at this stage of his career, Cena is just kinda there in terms of in-ring. By the end it picked up so I wouldn’t say this was a bad match, but probably a good thing this didn’t headline. Uso losing probably isn’t a great sign for him in the Bloodline, but I am not sure where we’re going with this storyline at this point, either. LA Knight winning seems to make me think he’s next for Roman Reigns, probably at Crown Jewel.

And that’s it! With Roman Reigns making his return after nearly a two month absence on this coming Friday’s SmackDown, we’ll likely get a bigger idea of what the direction will be in the next month as we slowly approach Royal Rumble season (and thus, WrestleMania season).