THE PENGUIN REVIEW: COLIN FARRELL IS NO PHONY SOPRANO IN DC'S SLOW-BURN BATMAN SPIN-OFF

With precious little information about the upcoming The Batman: Part II, Matt Reeves' Batman universe expands with HBO's 8-part spin-off series The Penguin. Once again starring Colin Farrell as wannabe Gotham City kingpin Oz Cobb, The Penguin's cast boasts newcomers like Christian Milioti, Deirdre O'Connell, Rhenzy Feliz and Clancy Brown and takes DC firmly into the realms of prestige TV.

Picking up immediately after the events of The Batman's ending, The Penguin deals with the aftermath of Carmine Falcone's death and the criminal underworld's attempts to consolidate their positions. Gotham City's crime families and gangs vie for control of the drug trade as chaotic heir Sofia Falcone (Milioti) and Oz Cobb make their own devious power plays. Is it all worth it? Definitely, but there are significant casualties along the way.

Somewhat inevitably, The Penguin has drawn comparisons to HBO's other top tier gangster show, The Sopranos, and the two stories do share some genetic material. But Colin Farrell's return as The Penguin is more than just a derivative clone in new DC pyjamas: it's a tense, bloody 8-hour commentary on power dynamics, deception, and the perculiar condition of living in Gotham City.

The Penguin Is Slow, But It's Worth It

Oz Cobb's Story Deserves The Space To Breathe

The pacing might not be for everyone, and there is a world where this could have been a movie - titled The Night of the Long Knives or Everybody Hates Oz perhaps - but there are big ideas that need room to breathe. And there’s a lot of story to get through. Just maybe don’t try and binge it all at once (thankfully something you can opt out of with HBO’s weekly releases), because it’ll hurt.

Though The Penguin does get glacial at times, the slow burn format is actually very clever: like Victor, the audience is set up to be groomed by Penguin. He’s not exactly impressive, but he’s compelling: a pragmatic villain, realistic about Gotham’s corruption who offers a means to exploit it. For the first few episodes, we are Vic, corrupted by his charm with flashes of his true capability, and it takes time for that sales pitch to take hold.

How The Penguin Sets Up Oz As The Dark Knight's Next Villain

HBO's New Show Could Have Been Retitled The Penguin Rises

There’s a danger with anything like this - built on the back of an excellent but largely bit-part character performance - that familiarity breeds contempt. Villain-focused stories often swerve too close to humanizing the subject, and losing some of the mythology, but by the end, The Penguin just about avoids the pitfall. Oz is very rewarding to watch, but you don’t really want him to win, even when his motivations are laid bare. This is not so much Breaking Bad as Breaking Worse, because Oz isn't ever really a good guy.

That's partly thanks to one of the grimmest, curb-stomp endings of any DC project that is shocking enough to leave a nasty mark, but which sets up Oz for his destined role in The Batman: Part II and beyond. At times, you genuinely do feel some connection to Oz, because his whole propaganda campaign is about personal betterment and taking down the elites, but by the end, he's despicable and deluded, and any vulnerability he might have projected vanishes.

Walter White is still an interesting comparison: more so than Tony Soprano, in fact. Oz’s plans for domination aren’t intricately planned, they’re reactionary and occasionally desperate, and there’s something of Bryan Cranston’s genius double performance in him too. After all, you don’t fear Heisenberg less because you saw Mr White in his underpants, and you don’t lose a sense of what Penguin will become because he didn’t nail the approach.

Sadly, it's already very easy to see where some of the more animated online criticism of The Penguin is going to focus. Because Oz doesn't arrive fully formed, he grows into his power, and takes some losses along the way. He's also an opportunistic victor in his inevitable rise, but for every accidental victory, there is a precise strategy (even if it comes in the wrong order), and The Penguin as a character reflecting Gotham's class conflict is a credible trade-off to him being an invulnerable tank.

Colin Farrell's Oz Cobb Performance Delivers (Again)

More Of Farrell's Stunning Transformation Is A Reward In Itself

Colin Farrell manages to balance perverse charm on top of the pile of Oz’s monstrosities: there’s just enough of his “all for a better life” propaganda that keeps him just on the side of appealing without a post-Sopranos deconstruction of the character. There is a mystery rolled into his backstory that justifies the decision to completely retell his DC Comics origin, and which makes him more interesting than a villain who just wants power. That work should pay dividends when it comes to facing him off against The Batman in Matt Reeves' sequel.

Farrell’s performance continues to be a joyful thing: it’s bigger here and more pronounced but with greater nuance at the same time. His physical performance is more pronounced - to justify the "Penguin" insult, of course - but the range he shows in Oz’s conflict is spellbinding. He’s at once a monster who will do anything to anyone for a sniff of consolidated power, and also a needy upstart with major Oepidal issues. He’s a hugely rewarding contradiction and Farrell’s take on the character is a top tier DC performance.

Cristin Milioti's Sofia Falcone Is A Major Stand-Out

The DC Newcomer Is As Crucial To The Penguin As The Titular Villain

Where the deconstruction in The Penguin does come is in Cristin Milioti’s excellent Sofia Falcone. She is everything I’ve ever wanted from Harley Quinn: a sort of reclamation that consciously bites her thumb to the sanctity of adaptational purity to offer a real look at the condition of being a woman in a mafia world. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and that goes doubly for a Falcone scorned.

Again, there is going to be discourse around her and some of the specifics of her story, which are for after the spoiler discussion curtain raises, but Milioti's performance deserves specific praise. The episode that delves deeper into her backstory is nerve-wracking and correctly gives her the space to shine without Farrell's presence trampling it. It also leads to a deeply engrossing subplot that culminates in her Cersei Lannister moment halfway through.

The mafia element is all very well observed, but Sofia throws a huge spanner into the works. She’s a walking challenge to the status quo: an inconvenience, partly because of her sex and refusal to accept the typical tropes afforded to molls and mob wives, and partly because of a delicious family secret. And while something like The Sopranos spent years showing the precise machinations of the mafia machine, Sofia’s story is refreshingly chaotic. Oz’s too, to a certain extent.

Sofia and Oz are interesting parallels throughout. Both are victims of Gotham’s corrupt class and crime systems, and both offer interesting discussion points on elitism, class war, and family legacy, which hovers over The Penguin as much as the murder of the Waynes does over Bruce Wayne. And in the end, you get a real sense of what Gotham's spell is, which sets up The Penguin himself as a bigger idea irresistibly.

What Doesn't Quite Work In The Penguin?

The HBO Show Is, Sadly, Not Perfect

Not everything works entirely: some of the characters fall too close to caricatures, like Deirdre O'Connell's Ma Cobb, and Clancy Brown feels terribly underused as Sal Maroni. The ponderous pacing at times makes the sudden bouts of hyper violence feel a little fetishized, and even while recommending it heartily, I’m not entirely sure it needed to be 8 episodes. It also doesn’t deal with its Batman problem well enough (nor that of Jim Gordon, who presumably took an extended vacation after The Riddler was caught).

Additionally, The Penguin's aesthetic is rather brown and yellow. The color correcting community on social media is going to have a field day with it, but it’s an improvement on The Batman, whose color palette was black, deep midnight, coal, and dark black mostly. It’s an obvious artistic choice, and there’s something to be said about the comment on the sludge of Gotham, but I might be making excuses for it here that not even I fully believe.

The Penguin Explores Gotham Without Batman, For Better Or Worse

It Doesn't Quite Answer The Nagging Dark Knight Question

And what of Batman? Matt Reeves promised his presence loomed over The Penguin, but he’s not much more present than a news report in the opening episode. From there he sits it out, and far be it from me to get all Homer Simpson about it, but it’s hard not to wonder why nobody even vaguely makes reference to him when he's not on screen. The city is in ruins and a crime war is raging after The Riddler’s attack on Gotham, and Vengeance, its great protector doesn’t even cast an ominous shadow over things.

This isn’t his circus though, and it’s important to acknowledge that Batman is a necessary casualty to the show’s agenda to show Oz and Sofia’s perspective of Gotham. We’ve had too many Marvel movies where the Avengers don’t show up for this to be too much of a distraction, but I do wish there’d be a slightly more careful nod to explaining why Batman is so absent, all the same. It makes it hard not to shake off the accusation that he's not actually Gotham's protector.

Still, The Penguin really sells the idea of Gotham. It portrays Arkham in a bold way (and explains why a spinoff set there would be incredibly difficult to sell), but it also gets into the mind of Gotham’s people. In Rhenzy Feliz's Vic, we have an insight into that, just as Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Blake was a street level voice in Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Around him, Gotham feels like a blanket, smothering but comforting: and you really get the dangerous hold it has on its people. It’s a rats' nest where the rest of the world genuinely feels inconsequential.

It's also fair to say that Vic's story ends stronger than it begins. Introducing any kind of kid sidekick is difficult to balance, but The Penguin manages to explain Oz's fondness for him in a way that adds depth to his own weaknesses. And Victor works as a sort of passive Batman stand-in, naively exploring the criminal underworld, without interfering.

Does The Penguin Justify Its Existence?

Spin-Offs Need To Work Harder Than Sequels...

We're repeatedly asked if it was all worth it in The Penguin as its core idea, just as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad before it, and it's hard to say no. Spin-offs always come with the question of justifying their existence, and in The Penguin's case, you do get the sense that they're actively trying to do something new, without the crutch of wider DC lore.

The show packs a lot into the 8-hour run-time, offering surprisingly heartfelt moments alongside the violence, twisting narrative, and bloody violence, and it's a strong addition to Matt Reeves' Batman universe. It manages to do what Lauren LeFranc clearly set out to achieve, and remains refreshingly different, despite the easy comparisons to other prestige TV shows on the broader level.

The Penguin episode 1 airs on Thursday September 19 on HBO, before the other 7 move to Sunday night.

2024-09-13T04:05:41Z dg43tfdfdgfd