If I had to screen a wrestling match for a bunch of non-wrestling friends, I wouldn’t mind putting this match on. It has so much action and athleticism that it can entertain even the most skeptical of viewers, and there’s enough blood and violence here to shoo away those stupid “it’s fake” sentiments. It’s a fun match with a glaring flaw, but fortunately it’s not the kind of ceiling that feels oppressive. This is still a banger, albeit a crooked one.

Ladder War VI took place at All Star Extravaganza VIII on September 30, 2016, with The Addiction’s ROH World Tag Team Championships hanging above the ring. Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian had to defend against two teams that had already spent years helping define the style of tag wrestling ROH was selling at the time: Matt and Nick Jackson, the Young Bucks, and Alex Shelley and Chris Sabin, the Motor City Machine Guns. The latter two teams also came into the match with history of their own, having spent years crossing paths in the American independent scene and TNA. More importantly, Ladder War still meant something in ROH. This was only the sixth one the company had held in fourteen years and the first to involve three teams, and ROH thought enough of it to put the Tag Team Championship above Adam Cole’s World Championship defense in the main-event spot. There’s a little bit of lineage here too: Nick Jackson later said that the three teams studied the famous Hardys-Dudleys-Edge and Christian TLC matches before putting this together. In terms of violence they match if not exceed their TLC progenitors albeit with some few issues that spoil the overall taste.

The violence escalates almost immediately, but what separates this from the hundreds of ladder-match spotfests that came before and probably after it isn’t necessarily the creativity of the spots but the awful bumps people involved take. Christopher Daniels seems to be the whipping post of this match. He gets busted open early, and from there the ladders gradually start looking like increasingly unpleasant places for somebody to land. Daniels gets powerbombed onto a ladder bridge before Nick Jackson comes crashing down onto him with a senton, while elsewhere people are being thrown into barricades, tables and any other piece of furniture happens to be lying around. Mind you, most of this shit is steel. I mean, you can’t really gimmick the sound of clank! Or maybe you can, but I don’t know how the science works back in the 2010s.

There are moments where you stop admiring the construction of a spot because the landing itself looks fucking miserable. Everyone is learning firsthand that gravity isn’t their friend. The blood gushing helps enormously. By the time Daniels is leaking all over himself and the ring is filling with broken furniture, Ladder War VI has lived up to the War part. It’s so violent and red that any casual fan watching it is probably questioning just how precious those tag titles must be. The suffering starts to really outweigh the prize, and I say that’s good because TLC matches should never feel routine.

Unfortunately, the Motor City Machine Guns stick out like a sore thumb. Shelley and Sabin are constantly doing things, so this isn’t a question of effort or involvement. But it’s the nature of the things they do that leave me suspect. They come off as glorified administrators, they set up the furniture, they facilitate spots, interrupt people and occasionally take some horrible bumps themselves, but as the fight progresses, it becomes clear that they won’t win. You can see them disappearing during the bigger moments of the match. There is a stretch after Christopher Daniels gets busted open pretty bad where the Guns have enough control of the match to win it but they never do, and that’s the closest they come to snatching the belts during the match aside from that six men-three ladders spectacle.

That’s a pretty serious problem in a match with three teams because uncertainty is an important element of multi-team struggles, and to achieve that all three teams need to feel like legit contenders and threats to each other. There are maybe a handful of moments where they put up resistance and I use the word resistance because I don’t think they ever functioned enough offensively to convince me that they had the aggression to climb for the belts. Contrast that with the Bucks who are constantly on the offensive by bombing everyone in sight and the Addiction who try to exploit every opportunity to stand up a ladder, and you can see that the Guns increasingly find themselves lying around ringside or surreptitiously setting tables to put people through with. By the way, great Uranage by Shelley, such a good lift on that, broke the table good.

Another small detail that irks me is the involvement of outsiders to aid certain parties to the match. I’m not a fan of interference unless it is intelligently and sparingly done, so tell me, what purpose do two more table bumps serve in a match that is already overflowing with spectacle and violence? They did not even alter the complexion of the fight. It’s just cheap thrills and easy fun shenanigans that detract from the madness.

Speaking of the madness, I appreciate the interplay between the Bucks and the Addiction. The Bucks supply most of the memorable sequences in this match: Nick’s senton onto Daniels across the ladder bridge, the 450 splash on a tabled Kazarian, and that glorious final bit with the elevated Indytaker. The brilliance of the Bucks is how clean and precise their execution of movement is considering all the activity in the match. They have Keaton-Batman striking where it’s not the most real-looking kicks and punches but it looks so good that it registers as quality in the minds of the viewer. Meanwhile, The Addiction bump and bleed for them very well. They sacrifice their bodies and their open veins to garnish this match with the kind of beaten flesh and pulp that gives all that spectacle its low-brow, unfiltered violence.

One final point of praise, I enjoyed the ring positioning in this match. The four major spatial zones—the ring itself, the apron, ringside, and the entrance walkway—were all used effectively. The bumps and the actions were distributed evenly everywhere. You got table spots at ringside, you got that scary Nick Jackson table spot just in the walkway to the ring, you’ve got good usage of the apron, and most importantly you have varying degrees of verticality: you have aerial spots from the turnbuckles and from the top of a ladder to the ring, and even people falling from the top of ladders all the way to the floor outside. These are the kinds of different looks and angles that make the action feel vibrant and not monotonous for me.

As I’ve said earlier, this match is just some crazy fun. It is one giant Instagram reel of really gruesome bumps and lots of blood. Despite a few hiccups, what we have here is a rare gem of an occasion where the wrestlers decide to let loose and trust the violence to carry the spectacle. It’s no Miracle Violence Connection, but the wrestlers make enough of a connection to perform some miracles of violence.

★★★½ — 3.50 — Marquee Main Event