Prime Video’s new thriller series from the Russo brothers is here, starring Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jones. Citadel will scratch that “underwhelming espionage action” itch, if you’re unfortunate enough to have it, writes Travis Johnson.
If you make a shark movie, you have to limit your artistic ambitions to making the second-best shark movie of all time, because Jaws exists. Same with exorcism movies, really. And if you’re making a series about an amnesiac super-spy trying to unravel a nested box of shadowy conspiracies before some wetwork specialist puts two in the back of their memory-free head? Well, the Bourne franchise is right there.
Which is to say the creators of Citadel, Prime Video’s new and ostensibly ambitious multi-culture (naturalised spin-offs are set for production in India and Italy, with more pencilled in for the future) thriller series, must be aware of the comparisons being invited and the height at which the bar is set. Unfortunately, the show passes well below it.
The Citadel of the title is an independent, international espionage agency and our nominal good guys. We meet our heroes, Citadel superspies Mason Kane (Richard Madden) and Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) in media res as a mission in the Italian Alps goes sideways, learning via a pretty decent train-bound action set piece that Citadel has been compromised by their evil opposite number, Manticore—operatives around the world are being assassinated, and the pair barely escapes with their lives.
Eight years later, Mason is now a dad with a wife (Ashleigh Cummings) and kids and no memory of his prior life. Regular therapy sessions do nothing to unlock the past, but the sudden appearance of former Citadel spymaster Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci) works wonders. It doesn’t take much for Kane to get back in the game in order to stop Manticore’s latest plot, and the first step is tracking down his old partner (in several senses), Nadia, who is similarly bereft of memories.
What unfolds over the three episodes out of six provided for review is a fairly rote spy thriller that cheerfully magpies shiny bits of previous works in the genre to create something less than the sum of its parts. There’s Bourne, of course, and a bit of Kingsman, some modern James Bond flavour, and the Citadel vs Manticore dynamic vibes more than a little with G.I. Joe and Cobra (would that Citadel had more ninjas).
It’s… fine, I guess, as long as what you’re looking for are recognisable genre elements strung along a predictable narrative throughline. There’s the odd flourish of decent action choreography (a moment where Kane cocks a shotgun before tossing it to Nadia in the first episode stands out more than anything that follows), some surprisingly bad CGI compositing in the bigger sequences (Citadel filmed all over the map, but digital effects are poorly integrated), and a growing sense that the destination we’re heading for is not going to be worth the journey. It’s all just so very generic.
There’s fun to be had watching the avuncular Tucci go ruthless and Lesley Manville as Dahlia Archer, secret Manticore puppet master, coldly order any number of brutal assassinations, plus Danish actor Roland Møller gets to be evil playing twin assassins, but there’s nothing in Citadel to lift it above the dozen or so similar prestige spy thrillers currently competing for our streaming dollars.
Executive producer Joe Russo, who co-directed the last two Avengers movies with his brother, Anthony, recently mused that AI could possibly be writing feature films in the next couple of years. Based on the first few episodes of Citadel, it seems like they’ve been experimenting already. If this is the future, it’s going to be a boring one.
