The Penguin: A TV Review - We Have a Frontrunner for the Best Show of the Year

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. The best show of the year and easily the greatest comic book IP series since Daredevil.

The Penguin, which stars Colin Farrell in the titular role, chronicles the rise of one of Gotham’s most infamous villains. It is the first tv series in filmmaker Matt Reeves’, director of The Batman (2022), DC Cinematic Universe.

The series, which premiered on HBO and the streaming service MAX on September 19th with its eight-episode season ending on November 10th, is set in the immediate aftermath of the events of The Batman (2022), but also serves as an origin story for Oswald Cobb - The Penguin.

For a variety of reasons, one of which is that I’ve had to sit through a cavalcade of terribly disappointing Marvel tv shows over the last bunch of years, I had low expectations when I sat down to watch the first episode of The Penguin.

I assumed the series would just be another watered-down piece of IP nonsense with little meaning or purpose beyond momentarily distracting me from the mundanity and minutia of life.  

Then I watched the first episode…and goodness gracious was I proven dead wrong.

The first episode of The Penguin hits like Bat Kick to the chest. It reveals a creative team that is dead serious about the subject matter and an artistic and cinematic sensibility and quality that is exceedingly rare in any television show…never mind a comic book television show. Put simply The Penguin is comic book series as elite prestige tv.

The credit for the show’s success goes first to the series’ creator and showrunner Lauren LeFranc, who expertly brought the cinematic vision of Matt Reeves to life on the small screen.

LeFranc’s fearless approach never allowed for winking at the audience or cutting creative corners. LeFranc set out to make a devastatingly dramatic television series that just so happened to be set in a comic book universe, and she succeeded spectacularly.  

LeFranc is loyal to the cinematic style of Reeves, and her ground-level view of Gotham is gloriously gritty, grimy, grungy and gruesome. As a result, The Penguin seems like a slightly lesser version of HBO prestige dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, as it looks cinematic and feels authentic.

For all eight episodes, LeFranc masterfully toys with audience expectations and conditioning. She subverts audience expectations so expertly at every turn that viewers are kept continually off-balance through the course of the narrative. And the finale is as perfect a piece of villain origin story as you’ll ever see.

The second person responsible for the success of The Penguin is the Penguin himself, Colin Farrell.

Farrell’s performance as Oswald Cobb, aka The Penguin, is as great a performance as we’ve seen in television in years. Under mountains of makeup which render him unrecognizable, Farrell is able to imbue his character with a vivid and frantic inner life that pulsates and radiates incessantly.

Farrell’s Penguin is a vulnerable, yet vile, violent and vicious villain. His relentless quest for power and his insatiable hunger for love are inexorably intertwined, and fuel his grinding ascent from lowlife street thug to high level mobster.

It is an absolute joy to watch Farrell in the last decade or so blossom into such a terrific actor. He has always been a naturally magnetic screen presence, but in recent years his skill has matured and made him into one of the best actors we’ve got. If he doesn’t win an Emmy for his work on The Penguin then there is no justice in this crazy world.

The rest of the cast are almost as fantastic as Farrell.

Cristin Milioti is essentially the co-lead in the series as she stars as Sofia Falcone, the troubled adult daughter of mob boss Carmine Falcone. Milioti is an absolute revelation in the role. She radiates an unnerving energy every time she’s on-screen…one that is both fragile and furiously fierce. Milioti too should garner Emmy recognition as she had a lot of heavy lifting to do in the series and does it with aplomb.

Deirdra O’Connell plays Francis Cobb, the Penguin’s mom. O’Connell is spectacular in the role of the scheming mother. In lesser hands this role had the potential to scuttle the whole show, but O’Connell gives a powerhouse performance that elevates the already superb series.

Rhenzy Feliz plays Victor, a homeless teenager who Oswald/The Penguin takes under his wing. Feliz at first seems like the weak link in the show. His performance feels a little thin and a bit shallow and showy…but as the series went on his work got stronger until in the final few episodes, he really came into his own. Ultimately, Feliz shows himself to be a very worthy actor.

The rest of the cast, which includes a few notable actors, like Mark Strong, Clancy Brown and Michael Kelly, all bring a gravitas and professionalism to the festivities that only adds to the quality of the show.

A bunch of years ago one of my friend’s father, the incomparable “Hollywood” Gary, made the astute observation that the reason why the Dark Knight trilogy was so successful and so good was because if Batman really existed in the world, that’s how it would be. I concur. The same exact thing is what makes The Penguin so good.

It is almost irrelevant that The Penguin is set in a comic book universe because it feels like a story about low level and low life mobsters set in the real world. This could be a spin-off from a Scorsese series like Boardwalk Empire for crissakes.

The battle between the cinematic universes of DC and Marvel haven’t been much of a fight for the last fourteen years or so. Marvel has dominated the cultural landscape and DC has stumbled through the failures that was the Snyderverse.

But since 2019, things have begun to slowly change.

That year Marvel capped its incredible run with the two-billion-dollar box office darling, Avengers: Endgame. But that same year DC came out with Joker…which was a prestige comic book movie that garnered a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor Oscar nominations (and a win for Best Actor and Best Original Score) and made a billion dollars.

Marvel since then has churned out a plethora of movies and tv series, most of which were mediocrities and some of which were considerably less than mediocre.

DC on the other hand, gave us Matt Reeves’ The Batman, and now The Penguin. Both of these pieces of work are vastly superior to anything Marvel has put out since Endgame. And even though Joker and Joker: Folie a Deux are not connected to the Matt Reeves cinematic universe, both of those films (yes, even the near universally panned Folie a Deux – which I actually loved) are undeniably more artistically daring and dynamic than anything Marvel has EVER done.

The best thing about DC at the moment is that cinematically, artistically and thematically, its cinematic universe is much darker than Marvel’s. This has been a complaint by some, but never by me. I like the darker material, and the Marvel material in comparison seems, frankly silly to the point of ridiculousness.

Visually the same is true. DC is making real movies with a distinct and artistically compelling cinematic aesthetic, while Marvel churns out the flattest and most visually bland movies and tv shows imaginable that look, frankly, unconscionably cheap.

The battle for comic book IP supremacy may be irrelevant at this point as the superhero genre seems to be in a recession which may head into a depression. But if we are measuring it in artistic terms, DC is winning right now and it isn’t even close, and that winning may lead to more cultural cache.

One can only hope DC keeps going in this direction…although I must say that James Gunn being in charge at DC and making a Superman movie does not fill me with much confidence that the ship will stay headed in the right direction.

Regardless of all that, The Penguin is undeniably the best TV series I’ve seen this entire year, and tied with Netflix’s Daredevil (2015-2018) as the best comic book series ever made.

If you have a passing interest in comic book IP or in mob movies and tv shows, you have to watch The Penguin because it isn’t just what a great comic book tv series should be, it is what a great tv series should be.

©2024

Echo (Disney +): TV Review - The Cries of Failure Echo Forever

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW HAS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an awful and idiotic waste of time.

Echo is the new Marvel five-episode mini-series streaming on Disney + and Hulu. The show stars Alaqua Cox in the title role, with supporting turns from Vincent D’Onofrio and Graham Greene.

Echo, in case you don’t know, is a Native American woman named Maya who is a master martial artist who is also deaf and has lost a leg. The character was first introduced to the MCU in the Disney + series Hawkeye.

I liked Hawkeye a great deal, and thought Echo was an interesting and intriguing hench woman. As a peripheral character she added depth to that show, but as the lead in a project she falls decidedly flat.

Echo is an absolute mess of a show. I’d call it an unmitigated disaster but disasters are more interesting.

The plot for Echo is laughably bad, the execution of it even worse. The action anemic and the acting atrocious.

Echo is categorized under the banner of Marvel Spotlight, which means it is supposed to be a stand-alone series, but if you haven’t seen Hawkeye, Echo will make absolutely no sense. Although to be fair, even if you have seen Hawkeye, Echo will still not make any sense.

Echo is set in Oklahoma, where Maya goes to get away from trouble in New York City and reconnect with her family and her native American roots.

The show leans heavily into Maya’s Native American lineage, and it is littered with flashbacks to the birth of Native people and the mysterious power Maya’s family has inherited from them. When these flashbacks aren’t incoherent, they are idiotic.

We also see flashbacks of how Maya lost her leg, and how a deep rift grew among her family. None of it is interesting or even adequately rendered.

Alaqua Cox stars as Maya, and she herself is actually deaf in real life, and also has lost a leg. One can only imagine the diversity, equity and inclusion orgasm Kevin Feige and Bob Iger experienced when they found a deaf, one-legged Native Woman to put in one of their projects. If Ms. Cox had been trans and/or queer too Iger and Feige’s loins would’ve gone thermo-nuclear.

Let me say first off that I’m glad that Cox has found acting work because it cannot be easy to be deaf and one-legged and get a lot of auditions. But it also must be said that Alaqua Cox isn’t exactly Meryl Streep as she is…by her nature, a very limited actress. The rest of the cast aren’t exactly the Royal Shakespeare Company either.

A major issue when committing to cast from a very specific ethnic group, in this case Native Americans, is that the talent pool is very, very limited. There are fewer actors to choose from and among that group there are even fewer good ones. Echo is populated by third-rate native actors and actresses that are entirely out of their league even on a silly series like this one.

The same thing happened with Martin Scorsese’s recent film Killers of the Flower Moon, where the Native actresses, in particular, were really dreadful. Lily Gladstone did solid work in the film, but besides her the cast is noticeably sub-par.

In Echo, Alaqua Cox is…not good, but she is someone who is Native, deaf and one-legged playing someone who is Native, deaf and one-legged…so she has that going for her. Besides that, she is quite wooden and impenetrable.

Graham Green is usually a very good actor, but even he is awful in this show. He plays a grandfather type figure to Maya and he seems to be fluctuating between sleepwalking and play acting.

My old friend Vincent D’Onofrio reprises his role as Kingpin in Echo and it is an embarrassment, not so much because of D’Onofrio’s acting, but because of how demeaning the entire enterprise is to the iconic character.

D’Onofrio was perfect as Kingpin in the Netflix series Daredevil, which for my money is easily the very best Marvel series ever made. But after a brief appearance in the Hawkeye finale, and now here in Echo, Kingpin’s status as a big, brutish badass, is in danger of being revoked.

Disney is reviving the Daredevil series and is returning the majority of the cast, but one cannot help but fear, if not expect, that they will completely fuck it up just like they’ve fucked everything else up in recent years. The castration of Kingpin in Echo points to the likelihood of the Daredevil series being neutered as well.

Disney is a disaster area and Marvel (and Star Wars) is in a state of such rapid decline and decay as to be shocking considering it stood at its apex just 5 years ago the culmination of its Infinity War saga.

Disney and Marvel’s addiction to feminization and diversity has sapped the MCU of its mythological meaning and its narrative and dramatic purpose.

Marvel has been turned into a weapon for cultural engineering instead of being a myth-making, and money printing, machine. Disney’s princess brigade has successfully castrated and feminized both Marvel and Star Wars, and both franchises are now left empty husks of their former selves.

As I have been saying all along, the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey are two completely different things, and you cannot simply replace a hero with a heroine and expect it to resonate in the collective consciousness. In other words, Disney/Marvel’s feminization/princess-ification of their franchises does not, as they hope, empower women, but rather strips the stories of all of their psychological, mythological and archetypal power.

Echo is a bad series not because it stars a twice disabled, Native American woman. No, Echo is a bad series because Disney/Marvel think that if a series stars a twice disabled, Native American woman that is all it needs. To Disney/Marvel, the show doesn’t need to be good…it just needs to be.

This is why diversity, equity and inclusion is such a cancer, it’s because diversity becomes the main focus, and quality is reduced to an after-thought if it is thought of at all.

In conclusion, Echo is a complete waste of time. The show is shoddy, shitty and stupid. I watched Echo so you don’t have to…and trust me…you really don’t have to.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

She-Hulk Season One: Final Thoughts

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!!****

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. DO. NOT. WATCH. This is easily the worst Marvel show (no small feat) and one of the worst shows I’ve seen in quite some time.

In Rob Reiner’s brilliant 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, Reiner’s Marty Di Bergi delicately brings up to the band Spinal Tap a critical review of their dismally received previous album, “Shark Sandwich”. The concise and precise review he references has only two words, “shit sandwich”.

After enduring the odious slog that was the nine-episode first season of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on Disney Plus, the two words that kept popping into my head were, “shit-hulk”.

In keeping with the fecal theme, I would declare two things. First, that She-Hulk truly is one of the most abhorrent shit sandwiches of a show I’ve ever seen, and second, the finale was the diarrhea icing on the repellent poop cake.

The fourth-wall busting finale was a desperate attempt to salvage a flaming garbage barge floating on a sea of sewage and it failed miserably.

The show decided to get all meta in the finale in a brazen attempt to disguise the fact that it had literally lost the plot. The result is it’s too clever by half and not half as clever as it thinks it is.

Believe it or not, it turns out the true villain in She-Hulk is not Abomination or Titiana, but rather people on the internet who criticize the show. I’m not joking. The insecure and self-absorbed makers of She-Hulk decided to make their online critics out to be the ultimate villains, and labeled these alleged internet trolls as misogynist incels in the process. How clever. How brave.

I guess in some ways She-Hulk’s finale is meta-textually interesting since it takes the decidedly feminist route of discarding reason and accountability in favor of embracing mealy-mouthed victimhood, a common approach in this narcissistically addled, masculinity-deprived day and age.

In this vein, people being held accountable is something that is of the utmost import to She-Hulk, and she makes sure in the finale that all the dubious men she comes across are all held to account for their failings. But in true girl-boss, neo-feminist fashion She-Hulk is herself allergic to self-reflection and blames others instead of taking responsibility for her own misdeeds and missteps. Big green physician, heal thyself.

She-Hulk is one of the most terrible, awful, no-good shows of all time for a variety of reasons, bad writing, bad acting and bad CGI not the least among them, but what bothered me most about it was that it defecated upon poor Daredevil while it shat upon itself, and I don’t know if the character will be able to escape the stench.

Daredevil the series was a stellar Netflix production (2015-2018) that ran for three season and Disney has now gotten back control of it and is saying it will reboot or restart the series.

The Netflix Daredevil was the best Marvel series ever made and it isn’t even close. Netflix gave Daredevil a gritty, grounded, R-rated feel…which is exactly what the character and story demanded and needed.

Rumors are that Disney is going to give its Daredevil its patented G-rating treatment and totally neuter the character and the series in the process. Watching Daredevil’s impotent appearance on She-Hulk was like witnessing a castration, and forbodes the once great Daredevil being turned into just another flaccid Disney Plus piece of trash series. Mark Ruffalo’s eunuch of a Hulk was bad enough, but now Daredevil? Can’t Disney just leave these big, bad conflicted men alone and let them kick ass and crack skulls?

The bottom line in regards to She-Hulk is that it’s instantly forgettable and entirely atrocious. It’s a cornucopia of everything that is wrong with our current culture and popular entertainment. I hated this show. I truly hated it. The only thing that would’ve made me hate it more was if Lena Dunham was in it.

On the bright side, at least the makers of She-Hulk succeeded in proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that women are entirely, absolutely, unequivocally incapable of being funny. Good to know.

As for the bigger MCU picture, She-Hulk’s egregious failure is a warning sign for Disney that the Marvel machine is in dire straits. The last three Marvel TV series, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel and now She-Hulk, have been absolute disasters. The last three Disney/Marvel movies, Thor: Love and Thunder, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Eternals, have been equally abysmal.

Marvel is such a money maker that the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule does not apply, but it also doesn’t mean that Marvel is invincible. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever comes out in November and a lot is riding on it. The original Black Panther made a billion dollars, but this is a different time and different movie with Chadwick Boseman’s unfortunate death. If the advertising is to be believed, the new Black Panther is a woman, and the movie has the familiar stench of Disney once again pushing a socio-political agenda on to viewers. Will audiences flock to Wakanda Forever? Maybe. Or will audiences be less inclined to go out and see it because they’re tired of the relentless cultural propaganda? A distinct possibility. My guess is the film will do well…but not too well, and not well enough to cast concerns over Marvel’s future into the abyss.

As for the tv side of things, the slate of upcoming Marvel TV series does not look very promising. And if the shitty She-Hulk is any indication, Marvel TV has gone deep into the toilet and it’s going to take a Herculean effort to remove it from its dark and dank depths. Consider me not optimistic.

©2022