The Penguin review: Excellent crime thriller buoyed by Farrell's sublime transformation

The HBO original series, a spin-off of 2022's The Batman, stands steadily on its own as an anti-hero saga

The Penguin premieres on OSN+ on September 20 in the Middle East. Photo: HBO Entertainment

In the cinematic world of Batman, rogues are most effectively taken in small doses. In 2007's The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger is on screen as Joker for 25 of the film's 152 minutes – Jack Nicholson before him in the 1989 film only 33 minutes.

And it only took Colin Farrell nine minutes to nearly steal the show as the Penguin in 2022's The Batman, a performance so transformative you wouldn't even realise the Irish actor was in the film if you hadn't checked the credits.

Great villains always leave you wanting more. But delivering more is harder than it looks. When we finally got a Joker standalone film in 2019, the only way director Todd Philips could make it work was to deliver a character who had basically nothing in common with the character we knew.

Superhero villains are not designed to stand alone – they're a foil, and without the tension between them and their heroic foe, there's very little steady ground to build on.

That makes it all the more curious that The Penguin, an HBO original series streaming weekly on OSN+ in the Middle East starting September 20, works so brilliantly. But if you look a bit closer, it should all make sense. After all, Matt Reeves's The Batman was, more than anything else, a love letter to film noir, a thoroughly un-super world built with the blocks established in the storied history of crime fiction.

In Reeves's Bat-noir, Catwoman is a femme fatale. Batman is the tortured private detective. Penguin is an ambitious mid-level crime boss borrowed heavily from characters played by Edward G Robinson, James Cagney and Bob Hoskins. And that kind of crime boss has always been a powerful leading man, making Farrell's star turn here almost inevitable.

The Penguin picks up one week after the events of The Batman. The city's most powerful crime boss, Carmine Falcone, is dead, leaving a power vacuum in his wake. And a flood caused by a terrorist attack has wiped out large parts of the city, leaving many desperate for a way to survive, or a way to escape.

We open with Farrell's Penguin in his night club, talking with Falcone's son. He lays out the dream he has for himself so clearly it may as well have been a Disney Princess song. When he was a kid, he explains, his neighbourhood had a mafia don who cared about the community, ruling brutally but fairly, always looking out for the little guy. When he died, the whole town went to his funeral, and his name was spoken ever after with respect.

But Penguin, we learn, is not a made man. He's a scrappy outsider who came from nothing, rising through the ranks because of his silver tongue and bloody fist, with a glass ceiling over his head that's luckily not bulletproof. To rise to the top, he's going to have to kill and outmanoeuvre all those who stand in his way.

Much like Hoskins's Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday or James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, there are layers to Farrell's Penguin, who prefers to be called by his birth name, Oswald Cobb, or Oz for short. Those layers are readily visible, literally and figuratively. First, he's covered in some of the best prosthetics ever put to screen, a skin suit you never doubt.

And the rest you can see all across his face. As with all of Farrell's characters, it's in the eyes and the eyebrows. He's ruthless but sensitive, a wounded animal you want to help but know will scratch your eyes out if you get too close.

It feels too easy to compare Oz to Tony Soprano – this is HBO after all – but it's impossible not to. He channels Tony in the best way, delivering a character who is sympathetic every moment he's on screen, even when his acts are most inhuman. Even at his worst, you can't hate him. You end up in an emotionally abusive relationship with him in your head, always ready to forgive things that he didn't even apologise for.

In a way, you can also see a bit of Breaking Bad's Walter White in Oz, especially because his character also has a Jesse Pinkman – a stuttering young man named Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz, Encanto) whose family was killed in the floods, and has turned to crime to survive. And he's a character you'll root for throughout, quickly becoming the beating heart of the brutal show.

There are two big flaws that stop this very good series from being a masterpiece. First is that, while Victor is a welcome addition to the fold, Oz is its only real oxygen, and the second he leaves the screen, you may quickly feel your attention span gasping for air.

While the eight-episode season is populated with a host of talented character actors who bring the world to life, none have the raw magnetism of Farrell. Cristin Milioti (How I Met Your Mother, Palm Springs) who plays the former Arkham Asylum inmate-turned-mafiosa Sofia Falcone, does her best to chew the scenery, but can't quite make the character feel lived in.

The second problem is that, at the end of the day, this can feel a bit like baby's first crime series. Superhero stuff has always played with genre tropes, but because this is in no way a superhero show, there's nothing to stop you from comparing it to the many things it borrows from, and it can't hold a candle to almost all of it.

There's constant lines here that are clunky versions of ones heard so many times before. How many times can we hear a character explain to us that there's no good and bad, there's only power? Soon, I feel, we'll probably have to leave these cliches to the AI generators.

But ultimately, even the end of the eight episodes, I was still anxious to find out what would happen next, and when the biggest emotional moments came, I felt truly devastated.

Series creator Lauren LeFranc has made a show here that is easy to recommend, even to those who suffer from even the most extreme cases of superhero fatigue.

The Penguin will release weekly on OSN+ starting on September 20