Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

WWE WrestleMania XXVII Blu-ray Movie Review

Are you ready to pretend rumble?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 12, 2011

If there’s any question about how successful World Wrestling Entertainment has become, all anyone need do is take a gander at at least a couple of elements in the 2011 iteration of its “flagship” annual event, WrestleMania. First of all, no less than 70,000 people are in attendance, at least according to the breathless hype of one of the announcers. But perhaps more tellingly, WrestleMania XXVII marks the “return” (as if he had ever been away) of The Rock to the arena which made him famous. Simply taking The Rock as the most prominent recent example of WWE’s reach into entertainment areas far beyond the ropes of muscle-bound child-men, it becomes easy to see what an incredible impact the WWE stable has had on popular culture. The Rock, whether he goes by his WWE pseudonym or his actual moniker—Dwayne Johnson—has become a rather formidable movie star, and that stardom is indelibly linked to his long tour as one of WWE’s most charismatic performers. With other guys like John Cena at least attempting to follow in The Rock’s wake, there’s little question that the WWE franchise is alive and kicking (and punching and body slamming) its way to a multi-media empire. WrestleMania XXVII combines all the outlandish showmanship that heralds virtually every WWE event into one big party, and this twenty-seventh outing is certainly no exception. The Atlanta audience is hyped to the max, and the WWE carnival—and it really can be termed nothing other than a carnival—is in full swing, with good versus evil center stage in the guise of any number of WWE heroes and villains. It’s loopy, to be sure, and there are of course a lot of people who would argue that this kind of “wrestling” is hardly a sport, but as an arena attraction, a show, it’s hard not to get swept up in the absolute lunacy of it all.

If the putative “headliner” of this event is The Rock, the overall affair is full of WWE superstars, as might be expected. Of course there are rote bouts between a number of guys who have “histories” together, as after all, that’s part of the fun. And longrunning storylines—and they are of course storylines—involving characters like Undertaker provide some supposed drama and suspense throughout this twenty-seventh WrestleMania. The Undertaker vs. Triple H bout is one of the more heavily hyped moments of this outing, but there are a number of wacky other scenarios, my personal favorite being the Phantom of the Opera-esque Cody Rhodes, who has been forced to wear a “hideous mask” (which is clear Lucite) to protect his supposedly devastating nose injury at the hands of Ray Mysterio, whose nefarious and allegedly accidental use of a knee brace led to Cody’s “horrifying” disfigurement. I mean, you can’t make stuff like this up—it simply needs to be seen to be believed, and even then, the believing takes a major effort.

The “wrestling” itself involves everyone from Edge vs. Alberto Del Rio to Randy Orton vs. CM Punk to The Miz vs. John Cena, and it can best be summed by simply comparing it to some of the more impressive contortionist aspects of any given Cirque du Soleil performance. Aided and abetted by a variety of stagecraft (the evil Alberto Del Rio arrives onstage in a Rolls Royce, which is then pummeled by Edge), this WrestleMania is of course less about any incipient athleticism than it is about having a good time and having clear heroes to cheer and equally clear villains to hiss. As with most WWE enterprises, some of the comedy bits, while inarguably lame, are at least as entertaining as the actual wrestling matches, and this WrestleMania includes The Rock as "comedian" as well as Snoop Dogg as a sort of quasi-American Idol judge. Perhaps the biggest laugh on either disc is seeing a close-up of the audience at the Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, where most of the women are draped in gorgeous evening gowns, lest we not intuitively comprehend the auspiciousness of the event.

While the first disc on this two-disc set includes a brief snippet of the Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, the second disc features that telecast unedited, and in some ways, it's the more entertaining of the two main elements of this release. The entertainment value may in fact be akin to watching a train wreck, but it's magnetic, nonetheless. Watching someone like Drew Carey get booed and fail to land any jokes may be painful, but it's a lesson in the odd dynamics between showbiz and this putative "sport" that is pure, unadulterated WWE at its "finest."

What ultimately can’t be overcome in this twenty-seventh outing is that most WWE fans are going to feel like they’ve seen this all before, and in fact they have. WWE has been trotting out these “character arcs” for so long that they seem increasingly passé and there’s simply no way to overcome that tendency. There are certainly enough outré elements here—I mean, where else are you going to get guest stars as disparate as Drew Carey and Pee Wee Herman?—but that may not be enough to ultimately make this outing as “immortal” as the announcers keep insisting it is.

WWE WrestleMania XXVII Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

WrestleMania XXVII arrives on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. As with most WWE telecasts, this sports above-average visuals that nonetheless never really rise to spectacular levels. A lot of shots look on the soft side due to the often overly aggressive lighting schemes. Better in this regard is the Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony, which boasts a relatively more natural lighting scheme. But several of the bouts, when lit with more or less normal stage lighting, boast decent sharpness and good to excellent fine detail, especially in close-ups. Color is very good throughout both of the discs on this set. Contrast sometimes gets muddled in the overly bright lighting, but overall this is an above-average looking set that should please most WWE fans.

WWE WrestleMania XXVII Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

WrestleMania XXVII sports one of the oddest combination of audio tracks I've seen (heard?) lately on a major Blu-ray release. Looking at the specs above, you might think you have your choice between two English offerings—an LPCM 2.0 and a Dolby Digital 5.1—as well as a Spanish language track in LPCM 2.0. But here's the weird part. The main WrestleMania feature, which takes up Disc One of this two Blu-ray set, offers the English Dolby Digital 5.1 mix and the Spanish LPCM 2.0 mix. In other words, no lossless mix, surround or otherwise, in English for this part of the set. On the other hand, the 2011 WWE Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony which fills Disc Two is presented in English in uncompressed LPCM 2.0. Isn't that just kind of weird? In any event, the main WrestleMania offers suitably immersive audience noises, which indeed spill around the soundfield with regularity, as well as occasional discrete directionality in terms of some of the actual bouts inside the ring. What's missing here is the bombast that a lossless track would have offered, especially considering the fact that there is so much pomp, circumstance and out and out sonic insanity which accompanies the entire WrestleMania event. Fidelity is fine as far as it goes, but the Dolby tendency toward clipped highs and less than resonant lows is noticeable if not all that troubling. The LPCM 2.0 track on the Hall of Fame telecast is certainly more rounded and full on the extreme frequency ranges, but it's obviously very narrow, and a lot of this particular piece is made up of archival footage, which sports less than state of the art audio to begin with. This is peculiar, to say the least. One way or the other, while the most ardent audiophiles will probably be at least a little disappointed with some aspects of this release, there's nothing here that is going to make you want to body slam anyone—at least, probably.

WWE WrestleMania XXVII Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Disc One:

• April 3, 2011 Home Video Exclusive US Championship Match Sheamus vs. Daniel Bryan (1080i; 18:53)
• Edge vs. Alberto Del Rio History (1080i; 2:50)

Disc Two:

• Highlights of Monday Night Raw (1080i; 1:08:40)
  March 28, 2011:
  Jerry "The King" Lawler v. Jack Swagger
  Triple H won't back down from Undertaker
  Finally The Rock has come back to Chicago
  
  April 4, 2011:
  The Rock and John Cena announce the Main Event for WrestleMania 28

WWE WrestleMania XXVII Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Maybe the simplified good versus evil world that WWE gives us is what we need in this era of grays and political spin. This isn't the best WrestleMania ever, but it continues the long tradition of showcasing the WWE's stable of performers, and it adds in a number of intriguing guest stars that at the very least ups the camp quotient considerably. If you're not too demanding, and are in the properly loopy (and/or looped) frame of mind, WrestleMania XXVII, while certainly not "immortal," provides a reasonable amount of fun.