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Following this past week’s debut of The Big Show Show, Netflix and WWE Studios’ family-friendly joint ventures continue with The Main Event, a half-hearted go at, basically, molding a Spider-Man style origin story into something that pairs with WWE. Which, admittedly, can’t be easy to do. WWE, and wrestling in general, is such a strange beast that its on-screen depiction in movies and TV shows is all over the place, quality-wise.
In The Main Event, Seth Carr stars as Leo — an 11-year-old WWE fanatic being raised by his father (Happy Endings’ Adam Pally) and grandmother (Little Shop of Horrors/Martin’s Tichina Arnold) after his mother, we’re told, left her family behind to run off with another man in a manner so cold and abrupt that it almost suggests mental illness. Bullied both in school and after school, Leo discovers a dingy old luchador mask that grants him superhuman powers. Not just the type that allow him to compete in a wrestling ring, but to do crazy strong things like swat down giant trees. Leo, now with a new streak of confidence, and a secret identity, can do things that the most powerful humans in the world can’t do. Again, it’s very similar to Spider-Man. In fact, they even call Spidey out in the movie.
The heart of the story involves the dad, Pally’s character, working up the courage to have a real discussion with his son about how he’ll probably never see his mom again (I know, oddly bleak considering she’s not dead) and also Leo realizing that his newfound fame and swollen ego is creating a big rift between him and his friends. The packaging and casing here is super messy though. When a masked Leo heads to televised wrestling try-outs, as part of a tournament that culminates with a steel cage match (more on all of this in a bit), no one seems to care that he has unearthly abilities. Sure, they marvel at this tiny person’s prowess when it comes to hurling a keg so hard that it crashes through the ceiling and winds up in the parking lot, but no one does more than drop their jaw. He’s just viewed as “really strong.” Basically, it’s the type of move where no one even realizes Leo, going as “Kid Chaos,” is a child until his mask comes off.
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So the more grounded elements of Leo and his struggling family clash with the cartoon-y antics in the ring. For example, WWE’s Otis, who plays a character named Stinkface here, apparently has fart powers to rival the X-Men’s Banshee sonic scream. He can break wind so explosively that it blasts his opponents out of the ring and blows back the hair of audience members. This is clearly a mutant ability that, again, gets shrugged off by all involved. Because wrestling in movies apparently can be anything.
Otis isn’t the only WWE Superstar in the film, of course. The Miz, Kofi Kingston, and Sheamus, along with NXT’s Keith Lee and Mia Yim, are on hand as well — with Lee actually taking on a sizable (no wordplay intended) role as a tournament hopeful, named Smooth Operator, who befriends Leo on his journey. The story is also boosted a bit by Pally, Arnold, and Ken Marino (who plays a sleazy manager).
But what will WWE fans who are Leo’s age think of The Main Event? Obviously, there are some dramatic themes that will resonate but ultimately it feels like the film’s aimed at kids a bit younger. Either that or the movie can’t make up its mind who it’s trying to wrangle. As mentioned at the top, WWE is a strange business, and not one that easily translates to screen. It always has to be reshaped and reworked into something totally different than how fans see it.
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Sure, animated mash-ups, like WWE’s intermingling with The Flintstones, Jetsons, and Scooby-Doo, require a complete re-imagining of the WWE product, but even a movie set in the here and now, like The Main Event, has to change a lot about WWE for the story to work. Like, do young WWE fans get irked at all when they see The Miz hosting a televised open call competition for a spot on the NXT roster? One that takes place over several weeks from a local gymnasium in small suburban town? Basically, a premise/set-up that doesn’t, and never will, exist within the real-life parameters of WWE? Do they care that when Leo and his grandma watch RAW it’s clearly SmackDown on the screen? It matters and it doesn’t matter, I suppose. If the film weren’t about a devoted WWE fan, it’d be easier to let these things slip.
2019’s Fighting With My Family, which told the shined-up broad strokes of WWE Superstar Paige’s beginnings, also had elements of this. Basically, that movie and The Main Event play very fast and loose with regards to “what NXT actually is.” Overall though, when it came to Fighting with My Family, Paige’s story was transformed to appease and appeal to, bottom line, non-wrestling fans and how they think wrestling works. It was meant to reach non-WWE diehards. The Main Event can’t seem to agree, even within its own story, how wrestling works.
