A failure as a comic, a failure as a gangster story – Daily Stormer

The series premiere of HBO’s The Penguin aired on Friday, and despite avoiding the politicization that has befallen many high-profile productions in recent years, the show is poorly written and lame. Neither the show’s reasonably high production values ​​nor Colin Farrell’s highly entertaining performance as the title character can compensate for the shoddy quality of the story.

In an infantile American culture obsessed with media derived from children’s comics, creators interested in working with more mature material have sought out comic book environments in which to craft their stories. The best example of this to date is 2019’s Joker , a well-made film that tackled mature themes within the visual trappings of comic book characters. Three years later, The Batman took inspiration from Joker and attempted to tell a gritty crime drama using comic book characters. While The Batman wasn’t a great film, it was visually stimulating and did a great job of establishing a tone of dark surrealism.

The reason The Penguin, a sequel to the 2022 Batman film, fails is because it tries too hard to be a gritty, hard-boiled crime drama while being written by people who don’t understand the genre. While The Batman could use the absurdity of people running around in suits to smooth over some of the problems in the ostensibly realistic story it was trying to tell, The Penguin, seemingly out of shame, refuses to focus on its comic book source material.

Whether you like comics or not is a matter of taste, but it is a valid form of storytelling. Superhero comics generally do not focus so much on portraying realism, but instead contain large doses of suspension of disbelief. The stories not only feature people in costumes fighting each other, but usually also have a layer of science fiction and fantasy. The characters are usually extreme and do not resemble people you would imagine in the real world. When you combine this genre with “gritty realism”, you get a kind of surrealism, which can work, and did in Joker, The Batman, and before that in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.

If instead of being a comic book that has elements of realism, you try to throw out all the elements of comic book storytelling and just use the names of comic book characters to tell a story that is rooted in reality, which is what The Penguin does, then you are responsible for telling a believable story that doesn’t require a lot of suspension of disbelief. This is why The Penguin fails. The gangster characters and the story don’t have the believability of gangsters from The Sopranos or a Martin Scorsese film. Everything about The Penguin feels ridiculous, even as its creators ask you to take it very seriously.

The show opens with Oswald Cobb, aka The Penguin, a high-ranking member of Gotham’s underworld, killing the new boss of the Falcone crime family. He gets away with it because the two are alone in a closed club. We’ve all seen enough organized crime movies to know that there would never be a situation where two high-powered criminals would meet without their entourage. However, the writers needed The Penguin to kill Falcone, so they created this incredible situation. After this, The Penguin finds some kids trying to steal the rims off his Maserati, and after apprehending one of the would-be thieves, enlists him to help dispose of the body. This high-ranking gangster, who is later revealed to be a large-scale mafia operation, simply picks up a random teenager off the street for what is presented as the most important job of his life. He proceeds to make this random teenager, who he knows nothing about, his right-hand man within a few hours. This represents the entire tone of the show’s writing. I won’t spoil the story, but it just keeps getting worse. The writing is amateurish and stupid, and only serves to advance the plot, to move from scene to scene, without feeling responsible for grounding the viewer in the reality of human behavior.

If the show had been more willing to lean into the fact that it’s based on a comic book, this kind of silly storytelling could have been skipped. But the show takes itself incredibly seriously and constantly reminds you how seriously. It just breaks frames to depict absurd acts of violence, and it wasn’t clear whether this was being done with self-awareness or if the cartoonish violence was meant to be taken with extreme seriousness as well.

In recent years, the decline in writing quality has been partially obscured by advances in technology and cinematography, with most “premium TV” shows being more spectacle than cinema. While the production values ​​make The Penguin look interesting at times, it actually feels a little cheap compared to HBO’s other high-profile productions. The visuals are utterly unable to carry the show.

In some depictions, Gotham is a city outside of time. In the acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series, it’s always 1939 in the city, with the buildings, clothes, cars, and technology reflecting that. Joker presented a Gotham from the 1970s. In keeping with the show’s clear intention to not be a comic book, there’s no attempt to make Gotham City feel like anything other than modern-day New York, which is a bit dull. Gotham isn’t a real city, and leaning into fantasy could have made the show feel unique. Choosing to make the city alien could have done a lot to alleviate the storytelling issues, but the creators missed the opportunity.

The only thing that sets the show apart is Colin Farrell’s mesmerizing performance as the Penguin, but that’s not enough to overcome the problems in the writing of the show. You’re just left with the regret that Farrell’s performance was wasted on such mediocre writing. The character of the Penguin, however, may make the show worth watching for some people, because that part is enjoyable.

While the show avoids the “woke” narrative, it’s notable that it’s written largely by women. That’s not at all surprising, given its inability to tackle the traditionally male domain of gangster cinema. Lauren LeFranc is listed as creator and showrunner, and she wrote the first episode. There are plenty more female names on the writing and producing list, to the point where it feels like the hiring process was an exercise in female empowerment.

The show is scheduled to air eight episodes on Sundays, and it’s possible that the quality will improve. Although that seems unlikely. Without Colin Farrell’s performance, the show would be a solid 2/10. Farrell gives it a few points, which bumps it up to a 4/10, but in my opinion it’s still a waste of time.