There’s a lot riding on Citadel, Amazon’s wannabe-franchise series, what with its reported $200 million-plus price tag (making it the second most expensive TV venture ever, after The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), designs for multiple international spin-offs, and a second-season renewal ahead of its April 28 Prime Video premiere. The streamer and executive-producers Joe and Anthony Russo have bet the house on their long-gestating spy saga, which was announced in 2018 and is intended to be a cornerstone of the company’s long-term small-screen plans.
Now that the initial results are in, it appears they might want to cut their losses.
At least in the first three (shockingly brief) installments of its six-episode debut run, Citadel is the definition of generic, trading in stock espionage clichés dressed up with superficial embellishments in a manner not unlike the Russos’ The Gray Man. That so much money was spent on such little originality is almost astonishing, and likely due in part to behind-the-scenes shake-ups, with maiden showrunner Josh Appelbaum and director Brian Kirk departing the project and Hunters mastermind David Weil taking over. Still, there’s no excusing the dearth of novel ideas dispensed by this by-the-books affair, whose action-romance is of a rote, enervating variety, and only made bearable by the moderate chemistry shared by its two leads.
In the Italian Alps aboard a high-speed train, sultry agent Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra) is on an undercover mission to thwart a passenger’s intended sale of a biological weapon. Before she can complete that task, she’s joined by Mason Kane (Richard Madden), a dashing and cocky colleague with whom she clearly shares a carnal history. Playfully charged banter ensues, as does violent combat. Mason and Nadia learn that they’ve fallen into a trap set by Manticore, a shadowy organization that’s in the process of wiping out all of Nadia and Mason’s compatriots in Citadel, an independent spy organization that, as is eventually divulged, is “the last line of defense for good in the world.”
Nadia and Mason are aided by tech expert Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci), while Manticore is led by UK ambassador Dahlia Archer (Lesley Manville) and apparently funded by the globe’s richest criminal families. This is basically a Bond-ian MI6-vs-Spectre set-up, although given its thin silliness, it more readily recalls the conflict between G.I. Joe and Cobra.
Amplifying the proceedings’ cartoonishness, Nadia and Mason’s train-bound skirmish ends with Mason waking up in a hospital with retrograde amnesia and only a (fake) identity to fall back on. Eight years later, Mason is married to Abby (NOS4A2’s Ashleigh Cummings) and the father of daughter Hendrix (Caoilinn Springall), but he begins poking around inside his head again once he starts having visions of Nadia.
For his efforts trying to unearth his origins through DNA tests, Mason is discovered by Bernard, who kidnaps his old associate (and his family) and lets him know about his past. Moreover, he clues him into an urgent assignment for which he’s needed: Manticore seeks Citadel’s super-top-secret briefcase because it contains the whereabouts of both every living Citadel agent as well as the world’s nuclear weapons.
While Mason can barely believe he was formerly a 007-style do-gooder, he hasn’t lost his ass-kicking abilities (they’re like riding a bike, I guess). As a result, he’s soon beating up baddies—including one of Dahlia’s twin henchmen (played by Roland Møller)—and acquiring the case, which also houses a serum that will give him back his memories because, you see, Citadel agents have their consciousnesses directly uploaded to servers and then put into liquid that can restore them via a simple injection.
Even by pulpy standards, Citadel’s fiction is pretty ridiculous, and it doesn’t get less so after Mason reconnects with Nadia, who had her memory remote-control wiped by Bernard, and who also can’t fathom that she was once a spy. An injection later and she’s back to her old self, although Mason isn’t so fortunate, thus creating a romantically tense mentor-mentee dynamic in which Mason can’t totally trust his former partner and lover.
Of course, nothing is what it seems in Weil’s series, as visualized by recurring upside-down and rotating shots that are meant to speak to the narrative’s topsy-turvy nature (and are an extension of the show’s glossy aesthetics). When everything is so obviously a ruse, however, it’s hard to take anything very seriously, and that’s certainly the case here, including with regards to peripheral characters who are destined to be unmasked as surprise heroes or villains.
Chopra and Madden make a good(-looking) pair, and their scenes together, especially at outset, lend the material a flicker of the sexiness and intrigue for which it strives. Moreover, they’re both adept when it comes to their roles’ slam-bang requirements, with Chopra in particular convincingly embodying Nadia as a skilled operative who can give as good as she gets.
Regrettably, they’re cut off at the knees by a story that welds together spare spy parts without much in the way of logic. There’s a shorthand quality to Citadel’s scripts, with pesky plot details skimmed over so that the show might get to its next international setting and derivative dilemma. Its dialogue isn’t any better; talk about passcodes, packages and key blocks, and pronouncements such as “game over,” “we can use this to take down Manticore,” and “everything you know is a lie” simply enhance the endeavor’s basicness.
Between Abby scoffing at her husband’s amnesia-badass revelation by likening him to Jason Bourne, and Bernard mocking Dahlia’s look-alike killers as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Citadel strains for hipness. Yet such gestures can’t overshadow the fact that its own tale is an imitation of a copy of prior adventures gone by.
Teases for the back half of the season suggest additional easy-to-spot bombshells and eroticized repartee, but not anything that hasn’t been seen before, and with greater panache. Consequently, the series isn’t incompetent so much as irrelevant—a rehash whose striking locations and ho-hum CGI fail to compensate for a lack of creativity. Amazon and the Russos may envision big things for Citadel, but they’d be wise to temper those expectations—if not turn their attention elsewhere.
Liked this review? Sign up to get our weekly See Skip newsletter every Tuesday and find out what new shows and movies are worth watching, and which aren’t.
