The good and bad of Braun Strowman’s Raw rampage

The good:

He was a rampaging monster.

The bad:

Randomly forgetting how to rampage.

Here’s the thing: if you’re going to present this man as a deranged psychotic beast out to destroy everything around him because he was fired from his job, you have to actually follow through on that or not put him in a position where you illuminate the fact that he cannot follow through on it.

The good, then, is having him beat up every security guard whose job it was to get him out of the building, or ransacking General Manager Kurt Angle’s office, or making his way to catering and putting Curt Hawkins through a table while everyone else scattered (and one guy got piss scared but was saved because he had some chocolate cake for the monster to snack on).

The bad, then, is having him break into the production truck threatening to shut the whole show down and then not backing that up.

This is a transcription of what he said as he was making his way through the truck:

”Fire me, I’ll shut this whole show down. What’s this do? If I smashed this right now would it shut all these monitors off in here? Huh? What about you? What is this? How do I shut this stuff off? What? You guys in here think it’s funny and I’m here fired. You think it’s funny? I’ll shut everything down. What does this stuff do, huh? What is this? Get out of here. Run. I’m shutting everything down. Get out.”

Now watch the video.

He doesn’t do a thing he said he would. Not a single monitor went offline. This bull in a china shop managed to avoid shutting down anything at all. The monster whose entire gimmick is to just straight up HULK SMASH got in and started asking questions about how to shut stuff off? As opposed to, you know, just smashing said stuff?

The most damage he did was to scatter some papers and -- LOOK OUT -- he threw a coat across the room.

His next move — remember he was here to do damage — was to disengage the tractor, drive the semi forward enough that it was out in the open and away from everything he claimed he wanted to shut down, and flip it over. That’s a neat way to show off his strength, sure, but his entire stated goal was to wreck shit. He quite literally did everything he could to ensure he wouldn’t actually do that. That’s actively harmful to the character.

Braun Strowman is great. He’s an incredibly entertaining wrestler. This isn’t on him. Whoever wrote this segment made one big misstep when they had him go into that production truck. Skip that step and everything they did here hit the spot. Throw that in and you contradict everything the character is supposed to be about.

The segment was a bit hokey but it can work as long as the characters remain consistent. That’s not what they did here, and that’s unfortunate because it was a lot of fun otherwise.