The Penguin review – Colin Farrell deserves all the awards for this powerful Batman spinoff

Yesterday at 05:20 PM

It's slick, fast – and doesn't feature the caped crusader once. The Irish actor is a revelation in a series that's so twisty it leaves you breathless

Though it stars Colin Farrell, reprising his part from Matt Reeves' 2022 film The Batman, and is set just after the catastrophic events in Gotham that the Riddler masterminded at the end of the third act, you're better off thinking of the Penguin as a kind of YA Sopranos than an addition to the Batverse. The Caped Crusader doesn't appear and all the villainy on show – including that of the Penguin, now known as Oz Cobb instead of Oswald Cobblepot in a further move away from cartoonishness – is of a very human kind.

Carmine, his boss and head of the Falcone crime family, was killed at the end of The Batman. There is now a power vacuum in the city and the series follows the Penguin's attempts to rise from his position as a mid-level gangster, trusted to run a nightclub and a portion of the gangsters' drug business but never fully accepted. It is his yearning for respect that drives him on through the deadly game of snakes and ladders towards his goal of dominating Gotham and makes The Penguin into much more than just another money-grubbing spin-off of a famous franchise.