The show begins with a Tag Team Battle Royal to name new Number One Contenders for the championships held by the New Age Outlaws. The Hardys and Edge & Christian had put on a highly-regarded ladder match at October's No Mercy show so it was only a matter of time before they'd become the focus of the division, but they weren't quite there yet. The same can be said of the Dudleys, who had debuted in August, but were still finding their footing in the company and had not yet gotten as over as they'd become in the months after this show. This is not very entertaining and the emphasis on the Mean Street Posse feels silly, especially in hindsight knowing that the gimmick wouldn't really go anywhere meaningful. The final minutes are good and all about building up sympathy for the Hardys, who end up looking pretty strong despite losing the match. Not terrible, but nothing worth watching. (1.5/5)
Backstage, Kurt Angle talks to Lillian Garcia before his match with Steve Blackman. This match felt like a long 7 minutes (and not in a good way). Angle was clearly already the better and smoother worker at this point despite only debuting for the WWE a month or so before this show (and only having trained for maybe a little over a year?). Blackman always struck me as a "clunky" worker who could hit hard and do the basics but lacked charisma and didn't look very smooth with anything he did. This match, on paper, seems like it might be interesting as it pitted Angle's Olympic-level wrestling against Blackman's martial arts, but Angle and Blackman were not experienced enough or capable yet of doing something that would've required creative spots and pacing and execution and all the little things that make a match memorable. At least we get the Angle Moonsault. (2/5)
Next up - the Evening Gown Pool Match. Jacqueline's facial expression when she makes her way towards the pool tells you everything you need to know about how excited she was to be in this "match." This is awful stuff and maybe the absolute low-point of the WWE's "Divas" years (save for maybe the introduction of Hot Lesbian Action). This match - really just an elongated "segment" - is most famous for ending with Miss Kitty winning and then exposing her breasts, the first and only time the WWE had intentional nudity on one of their shows (though they always tried to play it off as Miss Kitty going "off script"). Miss Kitty was Jerry Lawler's girlfriend and they would post super risque photos of her on Lawler's website so Lawler's commentary is unbearable and extra gross. This is just really skeezy stuff. (0/5)
Backstage, Rikishi talks to Kevin Kelly before he heads to the ring to team up with Viscera against The Hollies. This didn't last longer than 5 minutes and was all about setting up a Rikishi/Viscera feud that I don't remember at all. Hardcore Holly and Crash Holly were a decent team with a good dynamic between them but I wouldn't call them a "PPV-worthy" act. Back then, they really loaded the shows with lots of filler and that's what this is. (1.5/5)
Val Venis cuts a promo before his triangle match with The British Bulldog and D'Lo Brown for Bulldog's European Championship. This is an interesting match because, while it is full of botches and awkward moments, there are also sequences and spots that show that these guys were really trying to do something special here and just couldn't quite pull it off. They throw a lot of twists and turns into this match and even Bulldog, who was obviously well past his prime due to years of drug abuse, looks okay at times, managing to keep up with his younger, hungrier opponents. I'll give credit to the ambition and effort, even if the execution wasn't as good. (2.5/5)
X-Pac vs. Kane in a cage match is next. These two had been a tag team until X-Pac turned on him and then started creeping out Kane's girlfriend, Tori. Considering that this is the first match on the show that really feels like a personal, feud-based grudge match, you'd think the crowd would give more of a shit...but its really not all that heated and the crowd doesn't give a huge reaction to anything they do until Kane comes flying off the top of the cage with a clothesline. I was surprised to see X-Pac hit his X-Factor finish on Tori as, even in the Attitude Era, I felt like they shied away from man-on-woman violence aside from all the stuff they did with Chyna, Moolah, and Mae Young. Anyway, I'm not a big Kane fan, but this wasn't too offensive. There were some good bumps into the cage, but this wasn't as violent as it probably should've been considering the history of the guys involved. Just felt kinda "soft" and was almost instantly forgettable. (2/5)
Chris Jericho challenged Chyna for her Intercontinental Championship in the next match. Was this Chyna's best ever match? Without diving too deep into her catalog, I'm fairly certain this would be it (or at least in her top 2). Jericho and Chyna have a really physical match, but more than that, they fill it with great transitions and twists and turns to make Chyna look credible, but also make sure that Jericho comes out of it strong. He was over with the live crowd despite being a heel due to his charisma and character while Chyna was definitely on the downturn of her WWE run by this point. Chyna was a limited worker, but you wouldn't have picked up on it in this particular match because Jericho really bumps and sells well for her and lets her shine when she needs to. Loved the front suplex onto the table early. Loved Chyna's Muta-esque backflip elbow into the corner leading to a nice DDT. Liked the false finish involving the turnbuckle and the clean finish. (3.5/5)
Next up - Mankind and The Rock team up as the Rock n' Sock Connection to take on The New Age Outlaws, who were the WWE Tag Team Champions at the time. Pretty standard tag fare with a double face-in-peril so that The Rock could finish up with the hot tag. Al Snow does a run-in towards the end. Even back then I remember feeling like his feud with Mankind felt like Foley doing charity work to give Snow a bigger spotlight, but Al Snow didn't feel like a main event guy in the WWE and felt shoe-horned in. In similar fashion, the Outlaws were a very tired team by this point and hadn't updated their shtick at all since getting hot 2 years earlier. The Mankind vs. Outlaws 2-on-1 match from SummerSlam 98' is much better than this. The Rock almost feels like he's slumming it here having to wrestle in the tag division just because, with Austin's injury, they needed to spread the Superstars across the roster and not instantly go right back into Rock/HHH. If you experienced Austin's injury in real time, you most likely felt what a big hit to the company it was, but in hindsight, it feels even moreso because, while Angle and Jericho were right there, they were still relatively new to the WWE and not nearly as over as they'd become (and, in Angle's case, still a little green). The DQ finish is a real disappointment to the live crowd and because it goes close to 20 minutes, feels like a long walk to nowhere. Nobody's best work. Even Foley, who can usually be counted on to try to willfully save a match by doing a crazy bump or two, was uninspired and it's impossible to blame him. Sometimes you have a match on a show because you have a match on a show and this was that. (2/5)
The Big Show squashes Bossman in the next match. This could've and should've been so much better. Having now seen my fair share of Bossman matches, I've come around a little bit from thinking he was just a mediocre big man to actually seeing that he could be really good at times and knew how to play to the crowd. Here, its clear that the idea was to have Big Show make quick work of him, but considering what Bossman had done to him, Big Show should've not just beaten him in under 3 minutes, but damn near killed him. Considering Big Show would be main eventing WrestleMania 4-5 months later, he comes off as incredibly unimpressive and boring here and I'm not sure its entirely his fault. Someone screwed up with the production of the match by having Show just win clean without showing any real emotion or anger. This should've been Big Show chokeslamming Bossman within the first minute and then, instead of immediately going for the pin, just continuously chokeslamming him and putting him through furniture and maybe even choking him to the point of unconsciousness (kayfabe) with the referee either giving Bossman a DQ victory or throwing out the match as a no contest. Then, they could've had Bossman get revived or helped to back by Albert and get asked "Do you want a rematch?" and Bossman, having been thoroughly destroyed, respond "No rematch...no rematch" as he stumbled to the back. This was a real opportunity to make Big Show look like a killer and maybe even plant seeds for a future heel turn by having him show no sense of remorse for destroying Bossman (who, again, absolutely deserved to be thoroughly beaten here), but we don't get that. We get something resembling a squash (but not really because Bossman gets in too much offense) and no cathartic moment or character development in a match that needed to be that. This wasn't just bad, it was the wrong match to have entirely. A point awarded for Big Show's kip-up. (1/5)
Main event time - Vince McMahon vs. Triple H. So, in the lead-in to this match, Triple H had kidnapped Stephanie McMahon and married her. He - and his DX henchmen - had also beaten up Shane and, if I'm not mistaken, attacked Linda too? Anyway, it was The Game vs. the McMahon family and we, the fans, were supposed to feel sympathy for Vince. This is always, always, always the first misstep in any McMahon-related match (including the Orton/HHH feud around WrestleMania XXV, by the way). Anyway, the match itself is just a bunch of brawling and none of it is special or memorable. It also goes 30 minutes and involves one attempted vehicular homicide and McMahon falling from 30-40 feet off of some lighting rig and is still somehow suspenseless and boring for most of its duration. McMahon works best when he has a truly charismatic character to work against - Austin, Hogan, even the ever-playing-to-the-crowd HBK - but Triple H was never that guy. As others have said, Triple H has always been "the guy who works with the guy who makes money" and, in this match, his few interesting moments (mainly when he taunts Stephanie) are so few and far between that nothing else really sticks out. Vince, meanwhile, was not a pro-wrestler and really shows that in this match, putting together a 30-minute brawl that features no creative twists, no interesting transitions, no sense of pacing or plotting or organic elements, just big, loud crashes and bangs separated by boring, mediocre brawling. There's no elegance to this match. There's no story. There's no raising of stakes or crescendo'ing violence. It is literally "We'll do some brawling to start, then we'll go and brawl in the crowd, then you'll try to run me over with a car, then we'll get back in the arena somehow, then I'll fall from something really high, then we'll be back in the ring and Stephanie will turn on me and that'll be it." It is a connect-the-dots hardcore match lazily completed with numbers skipped over just so they can get to the "cool" spots and it is a long, boring 30 minutes to get through. Oh, and did I mention the Steph turn? Again, lazily done. One doesn't want to nitpick pro-wrestling angles too much because, ultimately, there is an "accepted reality" to pro-wrestling that we all agree to as viewers. Yes, in a No DQ match, one guy could bring a gun and end a match by shooting their opponent. No, in pro-wrestling, aside from one memorable angle in the mid-90s, guns don't seem to exist. Here, not only do we get that vehicular homicide attempt earlier (one of many that occurred around this time that, you might've guessed, led to storylines that aren't favorably remembered [such as the "I Did It For The Rock" storyline]), but we get Stephanie McMahon at the brink of tears watching her father get beaten up for 30 minutes only to reveal, at the end, that she was in cahoots with Triple H all along. Why didn't she interfere earlier? Are we meant to believe that if Triple H had successfully run over Vince that she would've been happy with that outcome? It's a heel turn that could've worked much better had they stopped to think about execution...but there was no thinking involved in this match. There was no internal logic. And, just because I've clearly given this match more thought than the producers or Vince did, I'll tell you how it could have been easily fixed. Stephanie should've been seduced by the violence. Stephanie should've seen the lengths that Triple H went through to not only get another title opportunity - which was the stakes of the match, by the way, not that the commentary team really does much to highlight that - but to keep his stolen bride. Instead, we later learned that this was Stephanie's revenge for letting the Undertaker kidnap her months earlier which, sure, is decent long-term storytelling, but doesn't answer the question as to why she didn't just turn on Vince minutes into the match. It would've been the same outcome and she still could've rooted Triple H on as he obliterated Vince for 6-7 minutes instead of pretending to care for 30. Again, I know this is nitpicky, but it is that attention to detail that separates a good or great match from one that goes too far beyond the "accepted reality" of pro-wrestling. Stephanie may not be an amazing actress, but I still would've preferred to see her attempt to get over the idea that there was some internal conflict here, that as the match wore on she came to realize that Triple H wasn't just doing this for the title, he was doing this for her. And you have JR on commentary to hammer that home to the viewers. What a missed opportunity. Do not waste your time and watch this match or ever re-watch it. It is boring and full of plot holes and it isn't even violent or creative enough to rank in the top 100 best hardcore matches in WWE history. A thoroughly bad match. A half-point because going a full zero seems like maybe too far, but a full point seems like too much. (0.5/5)
With a Kwang Score of 1.65-out-of-5, Armageddon 99' is a sub-average show. Even when I was 15 I remember thinking that the WWE, having lost Austin, was somewhat scrambling for some fresh storylines and opted to put on some extra racy and controversial stories in order to keep the crowds engaged - including having The Kat expose herself on this show. I've written enough about how bad the main event of this show was, but its worth noting that the rest of this card isn't too great either. The World Championship match is booked terribly. The opener is unremarkable. The Evening Gown Pool match is embarrassing. X-Pac and Kane's match and the WWE Tag Team Championship bout are both paint-by-numbers and wouldn't even be good as house show matches. Just an overall poor show.
FINAL RATING - DUDleyville
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