Amazon Prime Video’s Citadel, despite its jaw-dropping $300 million budget and promises of unprecedented television excellence, turns out to be ordinary. The show boasts a cinematic, high-budget feel, and the cast, led by Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden, is stacked and improbably good-looking. However, it is strictly humdrum television with intermittent displays of excellence, and the story does not break any new ground in the saturated spy thriller genre. Critics were only given access to the first two episodes, so there is a chance that the remaining season could surprise viewers with sheer brilliance.
Citadel is about Mason Kane and Nadia Sinh, who are part of a spy agency called Citadel that claims to operate solely for the betterment of all people, regardless of nationality, and wages intelligence and actual warfare on bad actors and organizations. The show carries a distinctly ‘created-by-algorithm’ vibe, something that is becoming depressingly common nowadays. As Kane and Sinh take on their latest high-stakes mission, they must grapple with the foggy remnants of their past and face off against the nefarious Manticore, Citadel’s antithesis.
Stanley Tucci plays Bernard Orlick, a technology expert who serves as an intel provider to Citadel operatives. British actress Lesley Manville essays Dahlia Archer, the British Ambassador to the United States who is secretly a Manticore operative. She dispatches her minions to track down and kill surviving Citadel operatives, including the main two.
The show opens on a train in the Italian Alps with a genuinely impressive and well-choreographed fight scene in a cramped lavatory. However, the rest of what the reviewer saw of Citadel was nowhere near as fun. The show retains its frenetic pace and bombastic action throughout, but there is little inventiveness and edge. The reason it is so loud and fast, the reviewer suspects, is that the makers hoped most people would then not really care about all the silly dialogue and plot contrivances.
The performances are solid, which salvages the show from being a complete failure. Priyanka, doing her best impression of a lifelong smoker who just ate a bag of gravel, is gorgeous and well-cast. Madden is playing pretty much the same role as in Bodyguard and looks at ease. Manville is good too. But Tucci is probably the reviewer’s favorite of the bunch so far—both sardonic and mysterious—and appears to be having a lot of fun.
In conclusion, good writers are worth their weight in gold, and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars to random people is not going to pay much in terms of dividends. While the performances are solid, the show is unable to get past the trappings of the genre, and there is little inventiveness and edge. Therefore, the reviewer would not hold their breath for the remaining season to surprise viewers with sheer brilliance.
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