2024-09-27 15:58:30
A scarred-faced gangster listens to his boss, who laughs in his face amid a drug bust. However, he chose the wrong one for jokes. A few shots are fired and the protagonist of the new series The Penguin, one of the most famous villains from the world of Batman, shows the darkest impulses right in the opening scene.
The sequel to last year’s Batman film, which can be watched from Friday at the Max video library, is a mafia drama full of repulsive people and actions.
Superhero comics, movies or sagas often follow the birth of protagonists or antagonists. However, the film directed by Matt Reeves already introduced the audience to a rotten version of the fictional city of Gotham, where it seems as if all the heroes were “done” a long time ago. And no one was a very pleasant sight.
The three-hour opus, almost completely immersed in the darkness of the night, left Batman, who hardly puts off his mask, to appear “in civilian clothes” as billionaire Bruce Wayne. Robert Pattinson portrayed the bat-like protector of order as a torn person engulfed by several murders and devastation over the nature of the city, in which he tries to negotiate peace. In places, he almost resembled the junkies that Gotham is full of.
The new eight-part series will do without Batman for the time being. And he continues to dive into the contours of the comic metropolis, where people fall into addiction to a drug called drops. At its core, The Penguin is more of a noir mafia drama, referring to female gangsters from the 1930s to contemporary crime fiction. But it is precisely the demonic villains of the classics of the genre from the days of old Hollywood that resonate the most when we think about the nature of the titular antagonist.
Colin Farrell, drowned in a fifty-kilo latex suit, from which only piercing black eyes peek out, is the embodiment of evil in its most down-to-earth, banal form.
Colin Farrell in the role of Penguin embodies the most down-to-earth, banal evil. | Photo: Macall Polay
A physically and morally deformed individual dependent on his mother, he does not hesitate to stoop to any meanness and foul play to survive in a world ruled by two families, the Falcone and the Maroni. And in which for a long time he was just a servant paid for not protecting himself from anything. Now they are turning these “advantages” against their employers.
The Penguin is not as stylish, formally refined as the film from 2022, to which it follows. Its creator and screenwriter Lauren LeFranc and the director of the first episodes, Craig Zobel, do not work so enchantingly with darkness, fog or sound.
On the contrary, they deal in detail with every detail of the Penguin’s body and face, from the golden teeth to the deformed foot. And there are a lot more relatively classically shot dialogue scenes. Nevertheless, the authors continue to gradually dive into a hopeless world very far from the one in which Tim Burton once imagined the Penguin.
While the antagonist of Burton’s 1992 Batman Returns, played by Danny DeVito, was a deranged criminal mastermind who drives around town in a rubber ducky car, Farrell’s Penguin deserves to be titled more by his civilian name, Oswald Cobblepot.
He is above all a low-level mobster with an almost childish need to grasp for power. And instead of a toy car, he drives a purple Maserati, which rather embodies the fact that he has certain ego problems.
When Oswald dismisses his employer Falcone, he begins to cover his tracks and also devise schemes to control the Gotham underworld, one can recall many mafia sagas with a similar plot.
But their protagonists, despite their immoral actions, usually had so much charisma that the viewer wanted to see how they build a potential empire around themselves. The penguin raises a sidekick right from the start. However, the audience rather feels sorry for this young black man, barely able to drive a car. That out of all the possibilities of how to get out of the bottom of the street, fate gave him this one.
The attempt to use the Batman universe as an allegory for today is not unusual. And the desire to make the most “adult” drama possible does not always work out, as shown by one of the most overrated films in recent cinematographic history, Joker by director Todd Phillips. He turned the Joker into a hurt poor person and instead of a convincing psychological study, he offered only an average, overly serious drama that tries to impress with quotes from Martin Scorsese’s films, when it offers rather a tearful caricature of them.
The author of goofy comedies like Arson in Vegas wanted, in his own words, to “smuggle a real movie disguised as a comic strip into the Hollywood system”. And it worked, just the opposite of what he intended. If it weren’t for that comic book “cover”, Joker would be just a literal, would-be psychological drama with force-sold socio-political overtones that nobody remembers today.
The Penguin is a mafia drama full of repulsive people and actions. | Photo: Macall Polay
After the first episodes, Penguin poses the question to the audience whether something similar is imminent. Whether the creators have not renounced their comic properties and what constitutes a given character in comic mythology so much that only a dark allegory of today’s uncertain times remains, where various villains understand power not as mafia bosses, but as political leaders.
So far, however, The Penguin has enough of a special magnetizing power to draw the audience in, even if it deviates quite a bit from the canon and consciously disrupts it.
For now, the series is floundering about halfway through. It’s a skilfully shot, albeit somewhat watered-down addition to Reeves’ stylish Batman, which was much more of a genre spectacle than Joker. It’s just that the novelty moves in a slightly different genre, more in the world of gangster sagas than superhero comics.
Perhaps flipping through the history of crime films from the movie Scarface to series like The Sopranos remains too much in the way of foreshadowing. Like Colin Farrell in this footage, the actor remains slightly trapped in his latex prosthetic armor.
Serial
Penguin
Creator: Lauren LeFranc
The series can be seen in the Max video library.