Why The Batman Would Have Been Better Without Colin Farrell's Penguin
Warning! Spoilers for The Batman ahead.
Matt Reeves' The Batman introduced a new roster of villains for the post-DCEU generation, including new spins on The Riddler, The Penguin, and Carmine Falcone. The film has come under fire for its hefty runtime of two hours and 56 minutes. While Paul Dano makes for a revelatory Riddler, the scenes with Colin Farrell's Penguin could arguably have stayed on the cutting room floor without changing a single thing about the outcome of the story.
In the movie, Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin runs The Iceberg Lounge, a club where Zoë Kravitz's Selina Kyle works. While following The Riddler's cryptic and murderous clues across Gotham, Robert Pattinson's Batman and a young Commissioner Gordon suspect that The Penguin's possible role as an informant on a huge drug bust may be linked to the high-profile deaths sweeping the city. After a dramatic car chase, Bruce Wayne closes in on The Penguin – and promptly finds out that he had nothing to do with informing on the previous bust.
Related: Everything We Know About The Batman 2
The Penguin is superfluous to the plot by design – a pretty audacious red herring given the scale of the car chase. His inclusion does offer the rare opportunity to see Batman get something wrong, but it isn't narratively important. DC blessed Batman with perhaps the biggest and most notorious roster of baddies, and most Batman movies tend to honor the legacy by stuffing themselves wall-to-wall with villains. Previous examples include Jim Carrey's Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face in Batman Forever, Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze in Batman & Robin, andHeath Ledger's Joker and Aaron Eckhart's Two-Face in The Dark Knight.
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