WWE Elimination Chamber 2012: Why John Cena Is More Intriguing Than Ever

There was a moment in John Cena's Ambulance match against Kane at the Elimination Chamber where Kane looked like he had Cena dead to rights. Cena was on a gurney and inside the ambulance, meaning all Kane had to do was shut the doors to seal a victory.

I highly doubt that anybody was fooled. At least, nobody over the impressionable age of 12, anyway.

Naturally, Cena escaped the ambulance and the tide proceeded to turn. Cena all but ended the match with a nasty Attitude Adjustment off the top of the ambulance, and then capped it all off by sealing Kane in the back.

Let's not kid ourselves. We all knew Cena was going to beat Kane. The creative team wasn't about to let him taste defeat with his match against The Rock at WrestleMania just six weeks away. Cena had to defeat Kane once and for all.

Credit where credit is due, at least it was fun to watch.

Now that it's presumably over, the question is what Cena's feud with Kane accomplished, and I think the answer is fairly obvious. It changed Cena.

It didn't change Cena all that much, mind you. His feud with Kane forced him to be more animated, and it certainly forced him to be more vicious. He's still John Cena, but WWE fans now have empirical evidence that Cena can be a bully when he has to.

No, it wasn't the full-on heel turn that many fans have been clamoring for. But if anybody out there actually thinks Cena is going to turn heel, they need to think again. 

What the creative team chose to do with Cena during his feud with Kane and in the climax of it at the Elimination Chamber is good enough. Basically what they did was paint Cena as a character who's not so damn wooden all the time.

It's a long-awaited new wrinkle to his character, one that will serve him well in the buildup to his showdown with The Rock at WrestleMania. You can rest assured that Cena will be built up as a legit threat to The Rock, as opposed to a mere patsy who will bow to The Rock's every move in a rare return to the ring.

If his feud with Kane can bring about a slight change in Cena's character, one is left to wonder what kind of changes could take place before, during and after Cena's match with The Rock. I have a few theories, but none of them stick out as being totally obvious (which was not the case during the Kane feud).

This is a good thing. Predictability has long haunted Cena, but I think we've entered uncharted waters. In the coming weeks, things could play out all sorts of ways. 

No matter what happens, we can take it for granted that WWE is going to take these next few weeks as a chance to lead Cena towards something definitive. After all, he's going to stick around after WrestleMania, whereas The Rock will go off and probably shoot some PG movie.

WWE knows it's not going to be able to rely on him to draw viewers after WrestleMania has come and gone. It can, however, go all-in on Cena.

A full-on Cena heel-turn would be cool, and that would definitely create all sorts of juicy possibilities going forward, but I don't think it's totally necessary. There has to be some kind of way to cast Cena as a kind of ultimate badass, a role that The Rock used to play and still does play. 

Since I don't want to and can't call it one way or the other, I'll just have to keep watching.