Review: WWE Smackdown (6-13-2025)
Live from Lexington, KY! Been re-watching “Justified” lately, actually.
Matches
Aleister Black vs Carmelo Hayes vs LA Knight vs Randy Orton: Follows the opening promo bit discussed below. King of the Ring first round match. At the opening bell, everyone sizing each other up, and Mr. Fighting Black is all cocked and ready but Carmelo Hayes just kicks him in the gut from off to the side a bit. Great focus, Al. You really are a master of the martial arts and a combat genius. I am familiar enough with HHH booking that I should really buy the idea that Hayes or Black could win this match in an “upset” due to the continuation of hostilities the bigger names have with others outside the match, but I never really feel it with this one, despite the best efforts of all involved. It’s gonna be Orton or Knight, and it winds up being Orton because of Knight’s continuing hostilities with SethCo. Awful RKO finish; I have never, ever liked the “I am jumping and have wound up in the RKO!” deal. But the pin is on Knight, not Hayes, who ate the RKO. Good match. ***½
Nia Jax vs Piper Niven vs Michin vs Jade Cargill: Queen of the Ring first rounder. Nia won the tournament last year, a repeat isn’t happening. Niven’s not winning shit, Michin isn’t winning shit, so that leaves Jade, most likely. I thought this was solid and as much as I find it absurd that Michin keeps getting run out there to be the least over person I’ve ever seen get a push at this level, I think she does well in the “picking spots” role Kairi had on Monday, and Niven has a really good showing. Much of the match is built around both hiding and showcasing Cargill, who does pin Piper for the win to advance. Pretty excited, honestly, to see what Roxanne Perez can do with her. ***
Dexter Lumis & Joe Gacy vs Motor City Machine Guns: And here it is, where the wheels completely fall off the Wyatt Sicks angle. Bo Dallas comes off like a complete pretender doing cosplay in the aisle, while Gacy and Lumis shit the bed in-ring. The only part of the Wyatt Sicks deal that comes off “real” is the intent to honor a legacy, and I suppose on some level this match does that, as it’s very much “the bell had to ring.” The crowd is dead, and this is bad enough that it could kill the idea to have Gacy and Lumis run through the tag ranks. This absolutely stunk. The Wyatt Sicks thing has no legs. Whatever flaws Bray Wyatt had — and they were numerous, I admit that as a big fan of his — he had a legitimate passion and dedication that his brother just doesn’t, and the others cannot carry the load because end of the day it’s just these three also-ran dudes and big league gimmick bouncer Nikki Cross. This was “MJF/Jarrett promo,” “maybe we just kill this idea” level. I’ll maintain a soft spot for the match because you just don’t see shit this fundamentally awful on big league TV anymore, almost ever. DUD
Candice LeRae vs Alba Fyre vs Alexa Bliss vs Charlotte Flair: Queen of the Ring. Fyre replacing Chelsea Green. Bliss interrupts Flair’s entrance after Flair disrespects Alexa a bit backstage before the match. Fyre and LeRae read the room and reckon they probably ought to work together a bit. I think it’d be funny to have Charlotte win the tournament but I also thought it was funny for her to win the Rumble this year and many did not agree. Candice takes the chance to actually show her worth in-ring, I think this is about as good as the other women’s four-way on the show but different ingredients make for a slightly different match, only slightly different though because WWE is pretty much all the same, match-to-match. I think that’s passively one of the things its greatest defenders like so much, that you basically know the consistent rhythms of every match, the pace is always the same even when there are surface level obvious differences like gimmick matches or whatever. Bliss snakes the win, pinning LeRae while Fyre won’t submit to the figure eight for some reason, tapping out just a moment after the third slap of the canvas. ***
Damian Priest vs Andrade vs Shinsuke Nakamura vs Cody Rhodes: Andrade is once again a show-stealer; like, I promise if that dude’s English were better and he was more capable of doing long promos, he really would be a headliner. Well, maybe. He’d have a much better chance. This is not me knocking Andrade, by the way, just a reality of being in WWE where they want top guys to repeat themselves for 15 minutes a week. Priest and Nakamura show some ***¼-type potential, Cody is Cody so everything he does is particularly executed and gets a reaction, he has truly studied the greats — “the greats” in all ways — and has made himself an incredible amalgamation1 of things that engage wrestling fans’ attentions, and always have. From promos to his in-ring work, he basically checks items off a list, but it works because he also tries to truly be good at all that stuff, not just doing it for the sake of doing it, and I think he gets why those things work. Cody pins Nakamura, the most predictable and correct outcome. ***
Other Stuff
Oh. Good. Just like on Raw, it’s John Cena again to kick off the show, and just like on Raw, it is exactly 9:29 into airtime before a wrestler says or does anything live. I said in the Raw review that it’s nonsense to do this “Cena gets to go out how he wants” thing, as apparently what he wants is to play the world’s most uninteresting heel. As much as I understand what Cena has meant to the company, the problem for me is I don’t think the company was ever very good with him as the top dog; in fact, he’s the chief representative of everything that stunk, Good Matches aside. But whatever. He’d been functionally out of the game for the better part of seven years or whatever, and despite all its chest puffing and big talk, this is not a company that actually cares about doing good stories, just Stories™. And this is a Story™.
Cena talks his mess on CM Punk and also Seth Rollins a little bit, but mostly it’s your new Cena standard. You people, I’m smart, I’m the best, etc. It’s simple and decent enough heel work, but it’s tired and uninspired.
And now here’s Cody Rhodes. Normal Cody stuff, forceful and 6/10. Here’s Randy Orton, too. “WWE royalty” all over the ring! Just like St. Louis, it really amuses me how tiny Cena looks next to Orton in 2025. John’s a big dude still, really, but you have the combination of him getting smaller and Orton being 72 percent HGH now creating this visual that John Cena is about the size of a guy you see buying plants at the Home Depot garden center. Orton loves Cody like a brother, but he will go through him in King of the Ring if necessary.
LA Knight is here. The shoulders on his vest are so funny. What he sees in the ring is the “WWE establishment,” and realizes — and likes — that he’s “the sore thumb” in this situation. He talks his mess and drops his mic, so Cena drops his mic, smirks, and leaves. Probably my favorite Cena heel moment thus far, actually. Said a lot saying nothing. R-Truth arrives to jump John from behind in the aisle and gets dragged out by security.
After all that and a break, John Cena is shown backstage with Nick Aldis. Cena is playing Earl Weaver and Aldis an umpire. That’s the John Cena I know, going from one tiny moment that’s really good into making everything he just did out to be sort of a joke just to amuse himself.
Later, Cena runs into Jimmy Uso. Cena is looking for R-Truth and/or Ron Killings. Cena then returns to the ring to call Truth out and eat up some more time on this show. Instead, he gets CM Punk, once again coopting Truth’s heat for a match WWE actually wants to run. “I’m so punk that my main concerns are sold-out arenas and people liking me.” What is this, a Green Day tour? The promo work is OK if a little overwrought. Punk shouts out Terry Funk, Harley Race, Bret Hart, and Eddie Guerrero as his Mount Rushmore, and I do actually buy this because those are guys he’s talked about for a long, long time, dating back to when he’d pop into IWA Mid-South fan chats on Yahoo! and talk to me about “Dog the Bounty Hunter” and Adrian Adonis vs Bob Orton matches.
R-Truth does show up again, clocking Cena from behind and locking on the STF, as Punk walks out and security arrives. After a break, Aldis finds Truth backstage. Truth wants a match with Cena next week, and Aldis quickly makes it so.
Jacob Fatu predictably starting to come off like a bit of a dork but he can work his way through it, I think. Could really use a bit more substance than figuring out where to get his four catchphrases into a paragraph’s worth of promo. Solo Sikoa appears on screen to say nobody cared about or wanted Jacob until he brought him into WWE, which I guess is sorta fair. JC Matteo cracking me up sitting all silent in the background of Solo’s lame-o (in a good way, Solo one of our greatest phonies) mob boss vignette shit.
Hey, would it kill them to just use real posters of real people from real fights that really happened because this AI shit hanging on a grown man’s “office” wall is a really bizarre touch. Why not just use old event posters from sister company UFC, even, if this is the idea? Multi-billion dollar company!
Anyway, Nick Aldis is speaking with Chelsea Green on FaceTime, as Chelsea wishes to postpone her Queen of the Ring match. Instead, Nick subs Alba Fyre in to do actual work. Alba and Piper Niven leave, and Zelina Vega comes in desperately trying to get herself over still. Probably won’t work. Talks like the internet and Rocky Balboa combined.
Naomi is done accepting scraps! She’s Miss Money in the Bank. WWE right now has Becky Lynch and John Cena doing kinda the same thing with Becky doing it better, and Seth Rollins and Naomi doing kinda the same thing with Naomi doing it better. In this case, Naomi just does “off the rails” so much more convincingly than Seth, seems way more truly deranged and deluded. And I really love the way the character fits her promo delivery style, which I often thought was a weakness for her. Reminds me of the way David Lynch or M. Night Shyamalan found particular actors who did their odd or stilted dialogue exactly as it needed to be done2.
Tiffany Stratton is part of this promo. She’s another somewhat odd promo delivery person, actually. Maybe she can lean into weirdo shit with Naomi and they can just go wild together. Not sure Tiffy “Time” is bold enough to do it just yet, but I think she should. And I mean, what difference would it make? WWE is a place where you can just be someone entirely new any given week. Naomi carrying this bit. The crowd tries “what?” on Naomi so she turns and shouts, “Bitch, you heard me!”
After 13 years of stop-and-start, weird lulls, and occasional flashes of what she can really be, Naomi might honestly be my favorite wrestler on the TV right now.
Nia Jax is back and she attacks Stratton, but it goes awry, only for a Naomi distraction to help Nia. Naomi considers cashing in now, but Nia puts the kibosh on that idea. Why? I don’t know! Stupid, maybe.
Still don’t think they have a clue what they want to be doing with Alexa Bliss.
Wrestlers from whom I believe Cody has taken sincere lessons: Dusty (duh), Ric Flair, Harley Race, Arn Anderson, Magnum TA, Sting, DDP, Dustin (duh), Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin (both Stunning and Stone Cold), HHH, Shawn Michaels, Mick Foley, Terry Funk, Jerry Lawler, The Rock, John Cena, Randy Orton, Kenny Omega, Young Bucks, Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Roman Reigns, CM Punk — it’s a long list and there are surely more. Again, this is not meant as shade to Cody; the man has really studied how to get the most out of himself and take from some greats, molding it into something recognizably “Cody.”
As a wrestling-related aside, Dave Bautista is so good at Shyamalan dialogue that I hope they do 10 more movies together.
God rest his soul, but Bray Wyatt was routinely the worst part of WWE programming in his last few years. Throwing a bunch of third-rate Bray Wyatts out there is a recipe for disaster, my god.
Legit lol’d when I saw the DUD rating