As far as movie tie-in shows and franchise spin-offs go, The Penguin is a lot more successful than it has any right to be. Picking up a week after the events of The Batman, the HBO series follows its eponymous criminal (a still-unrecognizable Colin Farrell) as he tries to climb up the criminal underworld's ladder and claim the top spot left open by his former boss, Carmine Falcone. It's a pulpy crime drama that mixes comic book storytelling with prestige TV classics like Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos.
To its credit, The Penguin also works as a continuation of The Batman. It effortlessly bridges the gap between its story and that film's in its opening minutes, and it already looks like it is going to set an even more interesting stage for The Batman Part II to play around on. That said, The Penguin does fall short of The Batman's standards in one important way.
To put it simply: The Penguin just looks a little too much like a TV show.
There's a reason why The Batman has garnered such a passionate fanbase. When it hit theaters in 2022, the film offered fans a take on the Batman mythos that felt fully fleshed-out and lived-in. Even more importantly, it didn't just look different from most other comic book movies of the past 10 years — it looked better than them. Together, director Matt Reeves and Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser crafted one of the most visually stunning comic book movies Hollywood has ever produced. From the use of certain lenses to multiple, well-timed focus pulls, there is clear, artistic intention in every frame of The Batman — not to mention depth and mood. Say whatever you want about its narrative flaws, but it's a superhero movie that feels like a film (as opposed to a $250 million TV episode).
In its opening minutes, The Penguin does its best to replicate the look and feel of The Batman. Its prologue takes place in that film's Iceberg Lounge and 44 Below sets, which gives The Penguin's first director, Craig Zobel, more control over the series' lighting and staging choices. But once Colin Farrell's Oz has left the Iceberg and started working on burying his latest body, The Penguin quickly loses the visual control, intentionality, and polish of its 2022 parent film. This jarring, disappointing transition continues throughout The Penguin's first episode.
In what feels like an unsuccessful attempt to replicate The Batman's atmospheric, overcast daytime scenes, many of The Penguin's exterior sequences set during the morning and afternoon are blandly lit and, at times, look washed-out. In general, there is less depth and nuance in The Penguin's cinematography than there is in The Batman. That film also, notably, blends real locations in New York, Chicago, and London to create a version of Gotham City that is simultaneously urban, metropolitan, and gothic. The Penguin, conversely, doesn't have any of the London-provided gothic-ness of The Batman. It is abundantly clear that the HBO series was shot solely in New York, and that makes The Penguin's version of Gotham City considerably less visually compelling than the one seen in its 2022 predecessor.
These flaws may have been unavoidable. The demands of shooting an eight-episode TV show vary greatly from those of a two or three-hour movie. Stylistic and visual concessions are almost inevitable. Thanks to Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti's towering central performances, The Penguin still manages to hold onto at least a portion of The Batman’s big-screen qualities, too. It is, nonetheless, jarring to watch The Penguin within the context of it being the first real follow-up to The Batman.
In 2022, it was refreshing and invigorating to sit in a theater and watch a comic book movie that felt like it was actually striving to do right by its medium and provide as cinematic an experience as possible. The Penguin, by comparison, feels content to be a TV show. To be fair, it works well as one. Its first episode's smaller budget and less striking visual style does, however, make the Gotham City of The Batman feel cheaper and less special than it did two years ago.
New episodes of The Penguin premiere Sundays on HBO and Max.
