WAS MARS A BIGGER STAR THAN MANNING?

It was a Super Bowl telecast in which the halftime show headlined by Bruno Mars received more enthusiastic reviews than the game itself. Chris Richards in the Washington Post wrote that Mars was “confident … and as charismatic as he was physical.” Adding the Red Hot Chili Peppers (a group that was “formed two years before he was born”) brought little to the halftime show, Richards said, adding that it appeared to be yet another effort by the NFL to play it safe. “He should have — and easily could have — done it on his own,” Richards said. “There’s only so much a performer can do with the Super Bowl halftime show slot,” commented Andrew Barker in Variety, “and Bruno Mars did plenty with his.” Barker, too, viewed the addition of the Chili Peppers to the show as a “sop to ‘older’ viewers.” Kevin Fallon in the DailyBeast.com was one of several critics who compared Mars’s performance with the Super Bowl players’, writing that he produced “more energy in five seconds than the Denver Broncos could muster in the entire first half.” Brian Mansfield in USA Today, who called Mars “the kind of entertainer with an appeal that can cross generations,” predicted that as a result of Mars’s Super Bowl performance his upcoming concert tour will become “a hotter ticket than this year’s game.” Scott Brown in the Hollywood Reporter was one of a very few critics who was unimpressed by Mars’s set, writing that it was more like something one would see at a wedding or a bar mitzvah. “Like a blind date with a great guy our parents picked out,” Brown concluded, “the whole thing felt ceremonial and remote. In other words: Still light years better than the abysmal game that bookended it.” Similarly, Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune noted that while in the past some of pop music’s biggest superstars have appeared during the Super Bowl halftime, this time “we got a one-man wedding band.”