Colin Farrell Joins HBO’s ‘The Batman’ Spin-Off

I’m not saying HBO Penguin is derivative, but it is the second TV series in less than six months to feature Colin Farrell playing a character fascinated by the glamour of old Hollywood black-and-white films — specifically, using clips from Gilda evoke nostalgia for a period that our hero could not personally experience due to his young age, a touching longing for a world full of secrets and morals that no longer exist.

The recent spate of origin stories for classic TV and film villains — Norman Bates, the Joker, half of Disney’s villainous catalog — has woven in an indictment of viewers lacking empathy.

These revisionist takes on iconic tales assume that in the process of getting viewers to root for characters traditionally coded as “heroes,” they fail to recognize that even the worst of these characters are rooted in very human conditions: loneliness, trauma, treatable mental illness, hatred of Dalmatians.

It’s a subgenre that proclaims, “Behind the story you know, there’s a story you never thought about,” a seeming revelation that opens up entirely new, fresh paths so that we don’t have to endlessly relive the deaths of Bruce Wayne’s parents.

Penguin is a spin-off of Matt Reeves’ series Batmana ground-up approach to the DC Comics story that introduced us to Farrell, completely unrecognizable under layers of prosthetics, as a nightclub owner and second-rate gangster. The thing is, offer me Penguin as a dwarfed, fish-swallowing freak in an ill-fitting tuxedo and skin so pale he’s practically transparent, and I’ll happily say, “Tell me more.” Offer me Penguin as a burly, underappreciated gangster with insecurities fueled by an unhealthy attachment to a mother who coddles him with one hand and castrates him with the other, and my first reaction is, “Yeah, I saw The Sopranos before.”

Creator Lauren LeFranc (Smacking) reconsidered Oswald Cobb — the “-blind” had to be abandoned at Ellis Island — not as a colorful, larger-than-life character requiring a complicated explanation, but as a prestigious, 2000s-style TV antihero who is relatable not because he has traits that every viewer can relate to, but because we’ve been identifying with characters like him on TV for 25 years.

It’s no wonder that this latest example of a Batman cartoon without Batman — see Joker, Gothamseveral CW series and Pennyworth: The Origins of Batman’s Butler — is least interesting when it focuses on its titular character. It finds the far more intriguing Sofia Falcone, played by Cristin Milioti in a defining performance of the series.

The action begins after the events of Batmanspecifically, the destruction of Gotham’s sea wall and the flooding of the city. With Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong in flashbacks) dead and Salvatore Maroni (Clancy Brown) in prison, there’s a power vacuum in Gotham’s criminal underworld.

Alberto (Michael Zegen), Carmine’s son, may be ready to ascend, but he’s addicted—“drops” are Gotham’s hot drug. For the purposes of our story, Alberto also has too little respect for Oswald, who has made big promises to both his reserved mother (Deirdre O’Connell) and the lady of the night (Eve, played by Carmen Ejogo) he loves. Everyone ignores Oz, and a few mockingly call him “Penguin” because of his waddling gait, caused by a poorly treated clubfoot, but he finds a new acolyte in Victor (Rhenzy Feliz), an orphaned teenager from a poorer part of Gotham that’s been devastated by the flood.

The only person who has a sense of what Oswald might be capable of is Sofia, a serial killer also known as the Executioner, who has just been released from the overcrowded Arkham Asylum after a decade. Sofia and Oz, who was once her driver, have a dark past, and in the present, things threaten to get even darker as they engage in a sort of Game of Thrones — especially since Robert Pattinson’s Batman is nowhere to be seen or mentioned.

While Gotham is its own uniquely grim urban space, not exactly New York but essentially New York, its entire universe holds up a grim mirror to a 21st century America on the verge of class revolt. The city’s working class citizens are tired of being neglected and left in helpless chaos. Its enclaves of ethnic criminals are tired of living in the shadow of Falcone/Maroni. All of Gotham’s institutions are poisoned and in the pockets of the top one percent, which would normally include at least Bruce Wayne, but see above.

Though Penguin It refers directly to gangster classics such as Godfather AND White embersand while it made me think of a few different HBO titles at different times, The Sopranos she lived, she often reminded me of wannabes in the prestige space, such as Ozark Or Low winter sunThe thing you’ll probably compare it to the least is Batmanwhich is by design. There are fleeting acknowledgments of the franchise that don’t really even count as Easter eggs, a determined ethos that persists… until it doesn’t.

The story is a rushed clash that races through three or four seasons of plot in these eight episodes. Ultimately, it’s just different bad guys playing similar and repetitively brutal power plays, with alliances formed but then broken too quickly to derive any pleasure from even the most fruitful character interactions. As with too many shows of its type, it serves us up a cycle of colorful threats, sadistic torture, predictable betrayals, and subsequent body disposals, delivered with professional polish but insufficient creativity.

Perhaps the biggest question anyone will have on this topic Penguin do Farrell’s dentures work like a full meal after funny beak With Batman. In this respect, Penguin is truly a qualified triumph. The makeup effects, designed by Mike Marino, hold up in long close-ups and under all but the brightest lighting. Oz’s resemblance to Colin Farrell is only occasionally visible, but this is not one of those prosthetics that leaves the wearer unable to emote through layers of rubber. The character can be awkward and angry and even, though perhaps insufficiently, funny and eccentric.

Farrell’s eyes are always visible and expressive, conveying the traces of a wounded soul behind the clumsy and cruel monster. Playing Tony winner O’Connell, who treats Ma Penguin like a Eugene O’Neill character, and Feliz, who offers elements of decency in a world where it is rare, Farrell reveals a slightly gentler Penguin.

The “qualification” for triumph is that a great deal of effort, even innovation, has gone into transforming a professionally handsome movie star into… a character actor. I’ve never shaken the feeling that this could have been a breakthrough opportunity for someone like Eric Lange, Pruitt Taylor Vince, or John Carroll Lynch, passing the savings on prosthetics to David Zaslav. Instead, it’s an opportunity for Farrell to do an effective, if over-the-top, James Gandolfini cosplay, to the point where the similarities in accents become unsettling.

Oz proves she can carry the story, but not in a fresh way. As such, attention will likely shift to Sofia Milioti, a character whose presence comes with less comic-book baggage. Sofia is treated more in the Cruella/Maleficent vein, as a woman whose dark path is dictated by the assumptions and constraints of patriarchy. Sporting the series’ best costumes, Milioti makes Sofia more believable than Oz as a tragic victim and embodiment of everything that’s wrong with Gotham, a character who can be felt with equal measure of sadness and fear. hand in hand the dynamic between these two brings Milioti and Farrell’s best work to the table, but viewers will be left craving the climax far too soon.

The rushed nature of the plot means that many of its most prominent supporting cast — Ejogo, Brown, Michael Kelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Theo Rossi — are underappreciated. The same goes for Gotham, where the locations and set design shine in a few episodes but get lost in the narrative shuffle of others. The dark and gritty visual style established in the first three chapters, directed by Craig Zobel and shot by Darran Tiernan, generally flattens out as the season progresses.

Penguin It occupies a place somewhere in the middle of a subgenre that I can never completely dismiss because every now and then it gives Bates Motel or even a Perry Mason (HBO version), among too many entries that never find their need. But if the answer to the question “How did Character X become the way he is?” is, “Well, you’ve seen…”, then you haven’t thought far enough outside the box.