The Penguin

A gritty, character-driven mob tale that stands on its own, "The Penguin" expands Matt Reeves' Gotham City with stellar performances and a thoughtful exploration of social inequality as fuel for criminality.

Both [The Penguin & Agatha All Along] are superbly made; in terms of production and performance and smartly written scenes, they are nigh well unimpeachable.

The characters played by Mr. Farrell and Ms. Milioti are not just entertaining adversaries. They are dynamic, dramatic and emotional complements to each other. As are the performances. .... That tactic [callous cruelty and casual brutality], combined with the convolutions and convulsions of a nonstop thriller, also makes "The Penguin" epic television.

A masterful examination of criminality, the show is twisted, disturbing and deeply enthralling.

“The Penguin” exerts an unusually confident grip. It’s a velvety, acidic reminder of how so many underworld tropes can be revived, and made exciting, with the right collaborators working as one, and the right actors taking the job seriously without treating it like holy writ or solemnity bordering on bloody sanctimony.

With suitably noirish direction and cinematography, a doomsday score from Mick Giacchino and outstanding performances by Farrell and the entire cast, “The Penguin” makes for gripping, engrossing television.

Thanks to an outright phenomenal lead performance by Colin Farrell as the iconic villain, it proves as engrossing and exciting as a Batman-adjacent show could hope to be.

The Penguin delivers a version of this character like nothing Batman fans have seen.

As significant as the star power of Farrell might be (not to mention the fact that he plays the titular role), I’d like to report a robbery: Cristin Milioti steals the show out from underneath him as Sofia Falcone, alleged serial killer and confirmed mob badass.

The Penguin is a fairly straightforward yet involving mobster story powered by Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti’s terrific performances.

Eight lurid and viscerally exciting episodes. .... Farrell immerses himself in this role with a steely absorption reminiscent of De Niro. [7 - 27 Oct 2024, p.6]

The Penguin introduces a brand new template into an exhausted genre, and Farrell and Milioti burn up the screen. This could be one of the strangest, sharpest, most original thrillers you’ll see all year.

Fans of the DC characters might choose to view this eight-episode spin-off as the origin story of the Penguin and his journey from mobster to monster. Others can watch it simply as a dark, gritty, gripping crime drama, the enjoyment of which requires no knowledge of Batman lore. It works as both.

The Penguin is compelling because of the very different but equally riveting performances of Ferrell and Milioti.

“The Penguin” stays interesting thanks largely to a litany of episode-ending cliffhangers and its female characters, Cobb adversary and former Arkham Asylum patient Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti, stealing many scenes) and Cobb’s mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell, “One Dollar”), who gives off Livia Soprano vibes.

He [Farrell] gives an endlessly compelling performance, well matched by his co-stars—particularly O’Connell, Milioti, and an underused Carmen Ejogo as Oz’s sorta girlfriend. They all richly inhabit the show’s well-articulated version of Gotham, a morass of tribes and cultures scrambling to survive amid the entropy of all things.

Lauren LeFranc’s take on the Gentleman of Crime soars, or rather waddles, past its competitors in eight short episodes, crafting a gangland epic from its comic-book origins that, if it doesn’t surpass, at least matches the sensibilities of its inspirations.

LeFranc’s unsentimental sidelining of Batman allows The Penguin to thrive in his absence, revealing new textures of a Gotham we might have thought we already knew everything about.

A spin-off that makes this return to Gotham feel both necessary and earned, with excellent performances from Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti.

“The Penguin” doesn’t overplay its hand enough to go broke, mind you, but it does undercut itself slightly with just a few too many meandering moments. Still, in terms of superhero-centric franchise TV, it’s arguably among some of the best viewers have been offered to date.

Director Craig Zobel has done a fine enough job of recreating the basic look of The Batman, all grainy sunlight and amber streetlights, but the show itself is so disinterested in anything to do with its source material that the connection feels largely academic. (There’s little of the brooding, noir-esque sensibility that lent the film its unique identity amongst the Bat-flicks; Oz’s troubles aren’t half as operatic as Bruce Wayne’s.) Farrell and Milioti remain compelling, but if—as the show promises—The Penguin is on the rise, we can’t quite grasp that trajectory just yet.

There is a fine line between grisly storytelling that is compelling and plots so depressing (and sometimes boring) you want to turn off the TV. "Penguin" jumps back and forth over the line for the eight-episode season. Still, it's hard to keep your eyes off Farrell. He is committed to the role, to say the least. He might make you worried if you don't watch.

Overall, "The Penguin" doesn't reinvent the genre by any means, but it manages to grow beyond most comic book TV adaptations with a dark, violent, and grim portrayal that never aims to please everyone.

Though The Penguin accomplishes its goal of telling a Batman story without Batman, viewers may be left wondering around the fifth or sixth episode of this eight-part series, "Wait, why am I watching a show about the Penguin again?"

There’s no reason this needs to be eight episodes. The good would have been more concentrated, more powerful, in fewer. The diversions could have been eliminated. Farrell plays Oz like a dumber, more desperate Tony Soprano. That’s better in small doses. Only when Milioti’s Sofia is mixed into the equation does “The Penguin” really soar.

It’s a series that is still finding its legs and could never surpass The Sopranos, though there are no better acts to attempt to follow.

Even if it largely succeeds on its own terms, “The Penguin” could’ve benefited from a little more romance and variation, rather than a relentless and gloomy dose of reality.

The writing isn't particularly deep, falling back on mob genre archetypes. While the tangle of feuds and double-crosses build to a strong finale, I spent much of the show's runtime covertly waiting for Sofia Falcone to come back on screen — which isn't exactly a good sign for the Penguin's impact as a protagonist.

Every character in Gotham City besides the Penguin, Sofia and Cobb’s mother is paper-thin (that unfortunately includes Vic, Cobb’s destitute sidekick, who doubles as his main interlocutor). If, on the other hand, “The Penguin” sticks to just this one season, I’d call it interesting but imperfect. The finale feels like a cliffhanger, not a conclusion, and the show’s boldest experiment (in genre terms) is just getting off the ground.

The inmates of Arkham aren’t the only ones who are straightjacketed. Comic book adaptations cannot truly serve both their native audience and televisual snobs. For better or worse, they always default to their home camp, and The Penguin is no different.

If "The Penguin" is worth watching at all, it's to see the lead performances from Farrell and Milioti, whose Sofia is more or the less the co-lead character. Even when the story they're stuck in lets them down, these two performers rise to the challenge and do exemplary work.

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 drama-filled second half of the season might just make audiences forget about the weak opening episodes - but the fact remains that there's a lot of fat that could have been cut to focus in on the most interesting parts of the show.

You must be content with a standard-issue mob turf war TV series, with thick overtones of "The Sopranos," as heavy and as gloppily applied as all that clay weighing down Farrell. This "Penguin" is a proximate real world, and not even a slightly heightened version of one, with no Batman and no fantasy world to escape to — or for it to escape to.

Oz’s prosthetics fit The Batman’s exaggeratedly gothic aesthetic to a tee, but they sometimes come off as a goofy intrusion in the otherwise realistic world of The Penguin. And there was an air of mystery and moral ambiguity to the shadow-lurking schemer Farrell played in the film. But as we watch him grunt his way through eight episodes of this series, that mystique quickly fades and he becomes just another player in just another run-of-the-mill mob story.

The mob drama being built around Oz requires something grander and more operatic to succeed. Unfortunately, The Penguin lacks the chops, the wit, and the wings to reach those heights.

Like entirely too many shows of this type, it treats us to cycles to colorful threats, sadistic torture, predictable betrayals and subsequent body disposals, delivered with professional polish but not enough creativity.

So while there are few if any real surprises, there are jolts, violent plot turns designed to shock and to deepen the emotional stakes. In the bleak, shallow context of the story, they play less as tragedy than as an off-putting moral vacuity. .... [Farrell] gives a modulated, fully committed, entirely professional performance. But it’s not a Colin Farrell performance. Adopting a grating New York-ish accent, he does a meticulous job of channeling gangster icons like De Niro, Pacino and Gandolfini.

Milioti’s performance and agile, noir-tinged directing from talented collaborators like filmmaker Craig Zobel (Z for Zachariah, Compliance) and TV veteran Helen Shaver (Station Eleven, Maid) aside, its greatest asset is the utter ferocity of LeFranc’s finale. But without the moral nuance that made The Sopranos so ripe for rumination and debate, getting there is a slog, weighed down by broad characters spewing comic-book dialogue.