Warner Bros.
The Batman (2022), Matthew Reeves’ rain-soaked and idiosyncratic take on the Caped Crusader’s adventures, wasn’t universally loved, but the film’s version of The Penguin, played by a nearly unrecognizable Colin Farrell, was.
So it’s no surprise that a WB Discovery looking for hits on its MAX streaming service would spin the character out for his own eight episode limited series on the platform.
Conceptually, the thought is enough to make a fan’s blood run cold: this kind of “extended universe” miniseries on the related streaming service have a spotty record in Marvel and Star Wars– for every one that works, there’s another that seems to be bloated in unnecessary minutiae and dragging the source material down in the name of corporate synergy.
Imagine my surprise– The Penguin actually delivers a dark crime tale that works on its own, and enriches the source film that spawned it.
The Penguin, both the show and the character, work for the same reasons the early seasons of Arrow did: they’re perfect revisionist distillations of a famous comic book character that change all the details but get right to the heart of why you liked this character in the first place.
The comic book Penguin is a brilliant, multi-level, planner whose heists would be perfect if he didn’t feel the need to be physically involved in them to overcompensate for his physical deficiency.
Farrell plays The Penguin (here, Oz Cobb) as a Newark underboss who seems one step removed from guys you would have seen at the Bada Bing in The Sopranos, but whose capacity for manipulation and pathological need for respect at all costs reveal to us over the eight episodes a character who is every bit as worthy of being Batman’s nemesis as the Joker: The Penguin in this show is operatically evil, and the show’s fearlessness in depicting that is its greatest strength.
The narrative arc of the show is a game of cat and mouse between Cobb and Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti, who is a perfect foil to Farrell’s lead character) as Cobb tries to move from underboss to the late Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong in the series, taking over from John Tuturro in the film) to drug kingpin while hiding the fact that in a moment of weakness he killed Falcone heir Alberto (Michael Zegen) over a cache of product.
A major source of tension through the show is Penguin’s apprentice of sorts, Vic (Rhenzy Feliz). After a first meeting that deliberately echoes how Batman met Jason Todd, Vic bails Oz out. The two find a common bond in their mutual handicaps (Oz has a deformed foot that produces his signature waddle, and Vic stutters), and when Vic decides against leaving Gotham altogether to stay with Oz, we as an audience know that there’s no way this is going to turn out for the best.
The sprawling game of bluff and double bluff being played between Oz and Sofia is mirrored by the show exploring the personal traumas of the characters. The violence they enact on one another and the city is a misdirected, tragic revenge for the scars their childhood inflicted on them. Sofia and Oz mirror one another in how they were twisted by parents unable to empathize with them.
The Penguin is a twisting narrative about broken, traumatized people playing out their insecurities on a city wide scale. What elevates it from typical genre fare are the incredibly committed performances from all the leads and the fact that this show, unlike so much of franchise TV, never loses its power to surprise the audience with unexpected, but perfectly logical developments, especially where Penguin’s relationships with Vic and his mother are concerned.
When you’re following a villain for eight hours, you’re not going to have the typical audience identification that most films and television enjoy. The Penguin works because it constantly builds the tension around a great performance from Farrell, where he seems beset on all sides by monsters even more twisted than he is.
Then, as with Tony Soprano or Walter White, he does something so heinous it reminds you who the real monster was all along.
Recommended.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login