What is it about Irish actors and Batman baddies? Back when Oppenheimer was just a tiny mushroom cloud in the eye of Christopher Nolan, Cillian Murphy put in a nuclear performance as the Scarecrow in Nolan’s Batman Begins. Two years ago, meanwhile, Matt Reeves’s franchise rebooting, The Batman, teased Barry Keoghan as a potential Joker. If Saoirse Ronan isn’t unveiled as the new Poison Ivy in the next six months, I’m throwing my Batarang away in disgust.
In the meantime, fans of comic book villainy and Irish actors in latex masks have lots to get stuck into with Colin Farrell in The Penguin (Sky Atlantic, Friday, 9pm). This spin-off of The Batman is hugely uneven and often extremely slow – but, goodness, is Farrell a powerhouse as criminal on the rise Oswald Cobblepot.
Farrell was introduced as The Penguin in The Batman, but that movie didn’t seem to know what to do with him, and he came off as an inept speed bump in the Dark Knight’s struggle against The Riddler. He’s far more fleshed out here – and “fleshed” is the word, with Farrell performing from beneath a mountain of prosthetics that give him jowls where you didn’t know people could have jowls.
The Dublin actor appears not to have found the process particularly rewarding. “It got in on me a little bit,” he said of the prosthetics. “By the end of it, I was b***hing and moaning to anyone who would listen to me that I f***ing wanted it to be finished.”
Acting-wise, Farrell meets his match in Cristin Milioti, who plays Sofia Falcone, daughter of late crime boss Carmine Falcone. With her father having died during The Batman, it’s all to play for in Gotham City’s criminal underworld and Sofia is determined to have her piece of the action. She is ruthless but unstable – and a victim of the Gotham patriarchy, which banged her off to an asylum when she previously tried to stick her oar into the family business.
Farrell and Milioti have the charisma to hold their own in a dull drama that tries hard to be the DC Comics version of the Sopranos. Barring a few Easter eggs at the end, it disavows all Batman lore (Robert Pattinson’s Dark Knight does not feature). Rather than weirdos in spandex having fights on rooftops, it muddles about in sub-par gangland cliches – it’s Goodfellas in a cape but without either the dazzle of a superhero feature or pulpy zip of a decent Mafia romp.
Still, that cannot be blamed on Farrell, who works hard to give us a compelling origin story for Oz – a wrong ‘un whose drive to dominate the Gotham underworld is eclipsed only by the mommy issues that have warped his mind.
He is paired with Encanto actor Rhenzy Feliz, who seems to have parachuted in from a YA Batman adaptation and plays an orphaned youth whom Oz takes under his flipper. The cast also includes Clancy Brown as Salvatore Maroni, another Gotham mob boss, and Michael Kelly as Carmine’s old lackey and a potential obstacle to the ambitious Sofia.
They all do their best but a moribund script invariably gets in the way. As a showcase for Farrell, the series has its charms. But as a compelling addition to The Batman universe, The Penguin is chillingly middle-of-the-road.
