The Penguin, review: Colin Farrell is a majestically fishy villain in gloomy Batman spinoff

Farrell and co-star Cristin Milioti shine, and Gotham City is satisfyingly grubby, but this dreary drama drags its flippers too much

3/5
Superheroes have been on a bright and bouncy trajectory ever since the rise of the Marvel Universe. But Matt Reeves’s The Batman pushed against that trend by returning to the dingy noir roots of Gotham City’s most famous crime-fighter. The 2022 film, starring former vampire heartthrob Robert Pattinson as the rubber-eared vigilante, was a success and has now spawned an eight-part television sequel, The Penguin (Sky Atlantic/HBO), in which Colin Farrell reunites with his prosthetic make-up to reprise the role of Oswald Cobb – a villain better known by his aquatic avian alias.
Farrell was a revelation as the Penguin, a cartoon monster he reinvented as a charismatic mobster straight from a Scorsese movie. He is just as impressive as he returns in this new series, which traces Cobb’s (Cobb, not Cobblepot, in this series) rise through the underworld following the destruction of much of Gotham by the Riddler at the end of The Batman.
He has a worthy foil in Cristin Milioti, who brings a slow-boiling menace to the part of Sofia Falcone, the emotionally unstable daughter of recently deceased crime boss Carmine Falcone. Alas, two talented and committed leads are adrift in a glum and dreary thriller which takes forever to build any momentum and assumes the viewer is deeply invested in the origins of the Oswald Cobb.
But does anyone care how the Penguin becomes one of Batman’s deadliest foes? In Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, the tale of how the young Oswald ended up as the Penguin was relayed in the opening credits. Perhaps that is all the screen time it merits. Needless to say, the makers of The Penguin feel otherwise. To that end, they have created a grim psychodrama centred on Cobb’s troubled relationship with his mentally ill mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell).
Pattinson’s Batman does not feature, nor does Barry Keoghan’s rumoured Joker. The only superpower on display is the producers’s ability to take a straightforward story about how Cobb’s friendship with Sofia has soured into a deadly rivalry and stretch it into eight hours of often tedious TV. On a positive note, The Penguin puts flesh on Gotham City as a nightmare version of 1970s New York. It is a dystopia of rattling overhead train lines, dingy alleyways and grim skyscrapers. Here, there are echoes of Todd Phillips’s The Joker, which likewise took inspiration from late 20th-century American urban blight.
Both projects conjure the heightened seediness of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. In The Penguin, a game Milioti plugs into that retro energy, basing her performance equally on the PTSD-afflicted Christopher Walken in The Deerhunter and Al Pacino in Serpico.
There’s a decent supporting cast, including the great Clancy Brown as imprisoned gangland heavy Salvatore Maroni. Young actor Rhenzy Feliz, for his part, does his best as Cobb’s milquetoast protege Victor (whose family was killed when the Riddler flooded Gotham at the end of The Batman). The Penguin, to its credit, also delivers a genuinely nasty shock at the end. But the dourness is exhausting and the pace creeping. For all Farrell and Milioti’s efforts, this spin-off is not quite worth anyone getting their flippers in a twist over.
The Penguin begins on Sky Atlantic on Friday 20 September
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