‘The Penguin’ review: Colin Farrell takes on Gotham’s Scarface in HBO’s compelling gangland saga

That’s twice now, for filmmaker and producer Matt Reeves. First he directed “The Batman,” the 2022 Batman movie we didn’t know we needed. Now, as executive producer, he has handed off the creative chores to others for “The Penguin,” an even more improbably compelling DC Comics-derived spinoff, with Colin Farrell as Gotham’s criminal striver Oz Cobb.

The eight-episode, roughly eight-hour HBO series launches Sept. 19 and adds new episodes beginning Sept. 29. Even if you’ve had it with superheroics or antagonist origin stories or gangster lore, or fine actors buried in prosthetics, “The Penguin” exerts an unusually confident grip. It’s a velvety, acidic reminder of how so many underworld tropes can be revived, and made exciting, with the right collaborators working as one, and the right actors taking the job seriously without treating it like holy writ or solemnity bordering on bloody sanctimony.

Admittedly, “The Penguin” wants to be “The Sopranos” so bad it can almost taste the red sauce. Farrell’s Oz owes a considerable debt to James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, especially in witty throwaway bits as when Oz balls out his protegé for ordering tacos with the wrong toppings (“Didn’t I tell you? No cilantro!”). Series creator and showrunner Lauren LeFranc and company roll out a narrative, familiar and conventional on the surface, pitting the Falcone crime family against the rival Maroni clan. There’s a new drug on the streets and a lethal battle for who’s going to profit in the wake of Gotham’s recent flooding and devastation and spike in crime. “The Penguin” starts about a week after the Riddler’s domestic terrorism has destroyed the sea walls. But this series, unlike so much of the endless Marvel hyperlinking and spinoffs, feels like its own world and own point of departure.

Why does it work on a story level? Several answers there, all of them gratifying. For one, the rhythm of the individual episodes varies in unexpected ways. Key characters, beyond the Falcone crime realm’s dodgy, enterprising, wholly untrustworthy lieutenant played by Farrell, emerge early in “The Penguin” as people worth following and giving a rip about. Straight out of Arkham Asylum, with a hefty resume of murders with her name on them, Sofia Falcone, daughter of the late kingpin Carmine Falcone, is played by Cristin Milioti as a shrewd mob princess who will not be confined to the margins of her scheming relatives. Flashbacks to Sofia’s appalling confinement in Arkham create useful contrast to the forlorn family dynamic of Oz and his disturbed, fogged-in mother (Deirdre O’Connell).

The crucial dynamic of “The Penguin” works like a magic trick, distracting us with sympathy and pathos while all the time building a subterranean pull toward darkness. Rhenzy Feliz is excellent as Victor Aguilar, a sweet, smart, wary teenager whose family was lost in the floods. He becomes a surrogate son to Oz, the thuggish, broken, duplicitous, comically unfit metaphoric father figure. As these two snake through the episodes’ complications and power plays, you may find yourself saying aloud: I can’t believe this works as well as it does. But it does, and there’s a pronounced assurance of tone even with eight different writers and several directors. (Craig Zobel handles the first three episodes.)

“The Penguin” succeeds largely but not entirely on the backs of Farrell, Milioti and Feliz. I don’t love the now-prevalent approach to casting a role like Oz, or Dick Cheney, or the schoolteacher in “The Whale,” and treating it as a three-way between actor, facial prosthetics and body suit. But neither is it an easy call, or a binary creative option. With “Vice,” in which Christian Bale turned himself into Cheney, the voice work and the cadences were spot-on, but the material (the script, that is, not the prosthetics) was cheap, reductive, one easy potshot after another.

Here it’s a different and more persuasive matter. Farrell’s physicality matches his minutely calibrated vocal rasp as Oz. He’s not recognizable as Colin Farrell but in this world of deception and shadows, the casting works. And for all the low-light nightclub murmuring going on, each time “The Penguin” ventures out into the trashed streets and grey skies of Gotham, the mingling of exemplary set design, cinematography (though it’s a mite heavy on the muddy copper tones) and digital scenic creations represents the top of the genre.

Is the genre, then, DC Comics movies, or simply Reeves’ “Batman” universe? I’d vote gangster melodrama, with a side of DC, because a side is enough DC for me in general. While owing a lot to “The Sopranos,” starting with a very close approximation of its show logo, “The Penguin” burrows back into film history to repurpose elements of “Underworld” (1927), “Scarface” (1932) and “White Heat” (1949). These reference points find their way into the series naturally, without a lot of “get it? GET IT?” The series does this right, too: It makes Oz a magnetic source of attention without lionizing his ambitions. The violence is pretty hairy, and now and then it’s used for routine purposes of establishing a character’s depths of ice-cold pathology. But when the final act of betrayal arrives, it hurts and it doesn’t let the perp off the hook. And that’s what you get when you get a comic book-derived spinoff worth the spinning-off.

‘The Penguin’ — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
TV-MA (violence, language)
Running time: 8 episodes, approximately 8 hours
How to watch: HBO series premiere Sept. 19; new episodes on Sundays beginning Sept. 29

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.