The Penguin

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.