Review: HBO’s The Penguin buries a gripping thriller in a cliched mob story

Colin Farrell playes the titular role in The Penguin, an eight-episode miniseries about the Gotham City villain’s rise - from mafia chauffeur to mob boss. Photo / HBO, @TheBatman

REVIEW

HBO’s The Penguin obviously aims for Colin Farrell to do for the Penguin what Heath Ledger did for the Joker.

The Penguin knows it isn’t original. Showrunner Lauren LeFranc’s eight-episode miniseries about the Gotham City villain’s rise - from mafia chauffeur to mob boss - joins a robust lineup of Batman spinoffs so expansive there’s even a prequel about Bruce Wayne’s butler. This one obviously aims for Colin Farrell, reprising the role he played in 2022′s The Batman, to do for the Penguin what Heath Ledger did for the Joker. There’s no dearth of ambition; in other words, this is an HBO production. The show looks good and bears all the hallmarks of a very particular (if increasingly hackneyed) model of prestigious TV in which popular stories are repackaged and retold, this time from the antagonist’s point of view.

The Penguin picks up in the immediate aftermath of The Batman. Mob boss Carmine Falcone has been murdered, sparking a succession crisis, and the residents of Crown Point (the poorest part of Gotham City) are struggling to survive after catastrophic flooding caused by the Riddler. Oswald Cobb (Farrell), an underboss for the Falcones, sees in the chaos an opportunity to stoke the ongoing rivalry between his bosses and another crime family, the Maronis (led by Clancy Brown as Salvatore Maroni and Shohreh Aghdashloo as his wife, Nadia). Egged on by his mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell), Cobb makes a play to seize power.

LeFranc understands the comparison she’s inviting by introducing another schlubby, heavyset mobster obsessed with his domineering mother. James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano haunts this series, even if Cobb is an uglier and inferior copy. Does it matter, I wondered a couple of episodes in, that the show acknowledges that it’s derivative? Even the title card, featuring a bold sans-serif font on a black background, feels like a riff on The Godfather rendered in The Sopranos red. But while The Penguin conjures a deliciously grimy, grungy, underground urban mood, there’s not much actual world-building - at least at first. That’s partly because the series orbits two characters defined by their isolation. Still, the references can start to seem like a crutch. Allusions are fun, but you can’t build a world by proxy.

The main characters in Cobb’s universe are his mother; a sex worker named Eve with whom he’s friendly (Carmen Ejogo); and a homeless kid named Victor (Rhenzy Feliz) whom Cobb catches in the act of trying to rob him - and presses into service as a combination driver and lieutenant. Then there’s Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), the daughter of the murdered mob boss, who was until quite recently serving a 10-year stint at Arkham Asylum for a series of murders she was blamed for but did not commit. Sofia knows Cobb well; before she was locked up, he was her chauffeur.

Unlike Tony, who had gobs of charm, Cobb is an unattractive protagonist. His greatest talent is working out, in real-time, how best to manipulate people who find him contemptible and pathetic. That’s a slight change from the comics. This version of the Penguin is neither dapper nor brilliant. He’s not an ingenious inventor, or good with gadgets. It’s impossible to imagine him masterminding a heist. The Penguin, here, is a crude instrument whose main advantage is that he seems slower and less brutal than he is.

He can, however, be a very hard worker. Farrell makes the character’s speech, like his walk, painful and a little laboured. There’s not a lot of lightness in this series, so watching Cobb trudge through this bleak, hyper-referential mob story starts to feel a little laborious, too. It’s tricky at first, partly because the show’s pacing is odd. The underbosses are too generic to be interesting, and the rivalries amid the various elements of Gotham City’s organised crime are as predictable as they are dull.

The biggest issue, however, is that Cobb isn’t compelling enough to warrant sustained interest in his backstory. This last is key to the antihero formula: You’ve got to psychologise the villain, seduce the audience into accidental complicity and (this is optional) impugn society for creating him. I wilted a little at the prospect of having to witness, through flashbacks, the process by which yet another villain broke bad. Cobb isn’t Tony Soprano. He simply isn’t likable or clever enough to generate that kind of curiosity or suspense.

That’s okay, the show says. What ultimately elevates The Penguin above some of its more transactional, not-especially-gripping violence is how definitively it establishes, by the last half of the season, that Cobb is not - and cannot be - the antihero of the show we thought we were watching. That revelation is, in its way, thrilling to witness. I won’t go into details: Suffice to say a late-stage development crucially and successfully reframes The Penguin as a juicy psychological thriller rather than a middling mob story or a subpar antihero drama.

The twist in question comes courtesy of the Penguin’s main antagonist (and the show’s most potent weapon), Sofia Falcone. The mob heiress, who spent her time in the asylum thinking about what she’d do when she got out, starts the series ready to unleash hell on everyone who framed her. She and Cobb spend several episodes circling each other, probing for weaknesses and a potential alliance. Their scenes together are electric. Milioti and Farrell have the opposite of chemistry; their sexless, burning antipathy is genuinely original and totally fascinating to watch.

The Penguin’s most potent weapon, Sofia Falcone. Photo / HBO, @TheBatman

Milioti renders Sofia as perceptive and eerily girlish. Her mastery of her unusual face - big-eyed, small-mouthed - is downright Olympian. Gamin and predatory, she can cycle through a series of microexpressions with astonishing speed or sustain a single mood for so long it goes from worryingly intense to downright creepy. Farrell’s physical transformation into Cobb is of course remarkable; he and the makeup department deserve all the accolades they’ll no doubt receive. But Milioti’s is the performance that really sticks with you.

The Penguin is billed as a limited series, but the finale feels like it’s setting up a second season. Were the show to continue, it may pose a problem that Cobb and Sofia’s relationship burns with an intensity that its workaday mob plots can’t quite match. Comic book adaptations usually try to smuggle in a few meditations on society, or injustice, or good and evil. The Penguin dabbles in moral philosophy here and there (with Sofia’s plot, especially), but the series feels like a thesis on hatred rather than criminality. It is weakest whenever it wanders onto sociological terrain. What few attempts there are to thematise inequality, for example, fail to convince, partly because the show’s engagement with the plight of the poor is almost as shallow as Cobb’s. 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. As executed, the show buries a gripping and genuinely inventive psychological duel in a leaden, paint-by-numbers mob story.

Luckily, for those of us craving more Milioti, there’s hope - in this franchise especially - for future spinoffs.

The Penguin (eight episodes) is out on Max. The second episode streams on September 29 and subsequent episodes stream weekly on Sundays.