Is there no limit to the number of times the comic book heroes and villains from Marvel and DC can be recycled? HBO’s The Penguin (showing on Sky Atlantic) is a spin-off from Matt Reeves’s 2022 film The Batman, which starred Robert Pattinson in the title role and Colin Farrell as Oswald “Oz” Cobb, aka The Penguin.
Farrell’s Penguin returns here as the star of his own show, though his extraordinary physical transformation makes him utterly unrecognisable.
The usually rather handsome Irish actor is reborn as a grotesque and malevolent gargoyle, his face pudgy and puckered, cursed with a painful lurching gait caused by a misshapen foot. His voice doesn’t sound like Farrell either. It could be anybody hiding in there, from Margot Robbie to Sir Ian McKellen, and we’d be none the wiser.
The show’s prosthetics wizard Mike Marino has described how they created the Penguin look by developing “a new kind of silicone… It was like many different variables of skin, like it was created by God.” The Penguin himself, however, is a rather godforsaken character, driven by a ruthless lust for power which enables him to kill or double-cross anybody who gets in his way. In the original Batman comics his surname was Cobblepot and he used to fancy himself as “the Gentleman of Crime”, but now he’s more like that gentleman’s portrait in the attic.
The action takes place in a squalid, run-down Gotham City, which looks very much like New York at its mid-Seventies nadir when it was dubbed “Fear City”. The fact that the despicable Riddler has demolished large chunks of the place by destroying its flood barriers obviously hasn’t helped.
Long story short, the death of crime godfather Carmine Falcone has created a power vacuum, with his children squabbling for control. Oz, a Falcone henchman, wants to make his own grab at the big time, and he starts by shooting a few holes in Carmine’s sneery son Alberto, who has “disrespected” him. “I’m gonna run this goddamn city,” he growls. He may look monstrous, but he also happens to be shrewd and pitiless.
It might be evolving into a mere crime-dynasty drama, but it’s a painstakingly-mounted show, with its grimy cityscapes realised in fine detail and equipped with a strength-in-depth cast. Oz’s plan for total control involves selling his inside-man services to the Maroni crime family, to whom he pitches a plan to stage a raid on the Falcones as they make their drug drops around the city. Maroni boss Sal (Clancy Brown, pictured above left) is forced to admit that it’s not a bad idea.
Meanwhile, Oz is playing a dangerous game with Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), who’s traumatised by the death of Alberto, but also disgusted by being patronised and infantilised by men, like Falcone underboss Johnny Vitti (Michael Kelly, pictured above). Her other brother Luca (Scott Cohen) is no better, and thinks Sofia should go and have a nice holiday in Italy and not worry her pretty little head about the family crime empire. He seems to be overlooking the fact that Sofia spent time in the Arkham institute for the criminally insane for murdering seven women. Oz, however, knows what Sofia is capable of, and wants to make himself indispensable to her. It’s all starting to simmer nicely.
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