As a fan of the first Reeves Batman film, and, more importantly, a die-hard Colin Farrell fan, I couldn’t be more excited for tomorrow’s release of HBO’s spinoff series The Penguin. And it’s not because I’m hungry for more stories of spandex-clad paladins blinking through the multiverse just to bludgeon narrative integrity.
Like so much of the American audience these days, I’ve grown weary of all these superhero shenanigans. Folks close to me will tell you that I am, indeed, a curmudgeon about all the dollar-signs-in-their-eyes Marvel franchises. You might have heard me say, once or twice, that celebrity cameos have supplanted narrative cleanliness. Anymore, these movies feel less like entertainment and more like overstimulation.
Having said that, what I liked most about Reeves’s The Batman (a young Bruce Wayne/Batman here played so deliciously-emo by Robert Pattinson), were pared-down, narrow-focused noir elements, and the tightly-cast ensemble. A young Batman like Pattinson’s had not yet been introduced to the larger DC Comics universe. Zoe Kravitz’s Selina Kyle, Paul Dano’s The Riddler, Barry Keoghan’s The Joker—none of them had even entered his consciousness yet. He hadn’t really even found his driving purpose until the end of the film, when he remained to help rebuild Gotham City.
Farrell’s Penguin only got about nine minutes of screen time in the film. Most of it was early in the runtime, before the major Falcone/Selina Kyle plot twist. The Penguin really didn’t see much action beyond that, being the middling Iceberg Lounge goon that he was in the film.
And that’s where we pick off with the series.
Gotham goes Moneyball
What we know most fundamentally about the premise of the spinoff is that it takes place in the immediate aftermath of Gotham’s devastation as portrayed in the Matt Reeves/Robert Pattinson film. Oz Cobb (The Penguin) sees a market gap, now, in the city’s crime underworld. The Riddler’s bombs have obliterated the sea wall, and he assassinated Carmine Falcone, but now The Riddler is locked away in Arkham.
Just as the 2000 Oakland A’s saw an entire market gap to seize in the statistical player pool (on base percentage, particularly), Farrell’s Cobb, like Littlefinger in Game of Thrones, sees this chaos as a ladder he’s all-too-ready to climb. This was apparent in the way Reeves wrote him in the first film—Cobb did not like being called Penguin, seemed largely dissatisfied with his mid-level role in Falcone’s operation at the Iceberg Lounge, and was a bit boorishly performative in a way that suggested he had moonshot dreams of being the front man of an underground crime ring.
It’s archetypal and glorious. The spurned, overlooked, dissatisfied apprentice thrusts himself into absolute power too quickly. If his performance as Cobb in The Batman is any indication, Farrell is ready to let rip and have fun with this character. Which should make for a roller-coaster ride of over-ambitious blunders, electrifying posturing, and—best of all—at least the suggestion of a tragic, too-soon tumble from grace. But potentially not until the next Reeves Batman film.
This is surely where Cristin Milioti’s Sofia Falcone comes into play. She looks ready to be the agent of Oz’s doom.
Bottom Line
This is less a superhero story—in truth, it’s more an antihero story—that will succeed if it leans fully into the power vacuum aspect of the premise. Readers of my Beetlejuice Beetlejuice preview know how much I loathe bloated ensembles. Reeves didn’t make that mistake in The Batman. I don’t think he will here, either.
Instead, I think we’re going to be treated to an absolutely feral Colin Farrell (Colin Feral?) as the titular character in The Penguin. He’s coming off some fairly rangy roles in Banshees of Inisherin, the Apple TV+ series Sugar, and Ridley Scott’s The Gentlemen. It feels, as a fan, like he’s signing on for more roles he enjoys, ones in which he wants to entomb himself totally.
I expect nothing less from The Penguin. As Colin Farrell’s performance goes, so too will the story, and the quality of the series itself. I have to imagine the end of the limited series will see him having reached new heights in Gotham’s power pyramid. Just in time for the announcement of the second iteration in Reeves’s The Batman franchise.
As for me? I think it’s about to go crazy.
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