Another example of Richard Madden sabotaging his own chances of playing James Bond — one character at a time, the Russo brothers ruining every last ounce of goodwill they earned through their Marvel movies, and Amazon diligently overspending on clearly cursed material, Citadel is a $300 million misfire that plays like something out of a ChatGPT prompt.
With this and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Amazon can now lay claim to the two most high-profile failures of the streaming age. Originally designed as an eight-episode franchise-starter with spinoffs set across the globe, the ‘mothership’ Citadel has now been reduced to a much leaner experience, comprising six episodes of roughly 35 minutes each, two of which were provided for this review. Remove the credits sequences and the ‘previously on’ segment — a blatant ploy to pad the run time up to a respectable length — and what you’re left with is a three-hour season that could easily be binged in one go. But Amazon expects you to tune in weekly, presumably because it is under the impression that Citadel might inspire water cooler conversation.
Marked by bizarre tonal shifts that can flip the vibe from deadpan exposition to Soderberghian caper in a matter of seconds, and a lazy aesthetic that might remind Priyanka Chopra of exactly the sort of standard-issue network television that she is trying so hard to distance herself from, Citadel opens with a big action sequence set aboard a futuristic looking train. It lasts about 15 minutes, which is more than enough time for you to gauge exactly how clumsy the writing is going to be on this thing.
Chopra and Madden, who appear to be caught in an interminable struggle to rise above the mediocrity of the material they’ve been served, star as the elite spies Nadia Sinh and Mason Kane, who collectively lose their memories after getting backstabbed by one of their own and being left for dead aboard that train. Nadia, you might be surprised to learn, is completely absent from the rest of episode one, as the show jumps forward by eight years and trains its focus on Mason’s ‘reactivation’ as a secret agent.
Devoid of any spark whatsoever — both in terms of visual style and between its two attractive leads — this opening sequence, on a storytelling level, almost single-handedly robs the show of all suspense and any potential viewer engagement. Because we know exactly how Nadia and Mason lost their memories, it feels utterly pointless to watch them spend two episodes trying to connect the dots. It gives you the impression that you’re one step ahead of the characters, whereas a show like this should always be a step ahead of everybody else.
Citadel is routine spy stuff, complete with amnesiac protagonists, covert organisations, and world-ending stakes, but crucially, no wit or elegance. It’s the the kind of generic show in which a spy character smirks to themselves, and says, ‘it’s good to be back’, moments before tailing someone; the kind of show in which a random goon looks the spy protagonist dead in the eye, and snarls, “What are you? CIA, MI6?”
Of course they aren’t CIA or MI6. In case you were wondering, the secret spy organisation that Nadia and Mason belong to is called Citadel, and based on the tech wiz Bernard Orlick’s (Stanley Tucci) description, it sounds like a cross between the Kingsmen and the Eternals. Citadel, Bernard announces for the benefit of the audience, is a spy agency with no ties to any government. Founded a century ago, the agency’s goal is to shape the progress of humanity from the shadows, and to protect the world from the forces of evil. Bernard explains all this using visual aids — old news footage, mugshots, documents — almost as if he knows that he’s the exposition device in an overpriced streaming show.
The Spectre equivalent in this universe is an organisation called Manticore, which, Bernard further explains, was created by rich families with an aim to manipulate world events with the aid of an in-house spy agency of their own. They’re basically the Illuminati, and their representative is a politician named Dahlia Archer, played by Lesley Manville. She appears a couple of times in the first two episodes, but we don’t really get a sense of who she is, or why Citadel and Manticore have been feuding for a century.
Nor do we quite understand why we’re supposed to root for Nadia and Mason. This wouldn’t be a problem had Citadel, the show, not gone out of its way to take the emotional route. But it doesn’t have the courage — understandably so, considering how it turned out — to keep the audience in the dark about certain things, thereby heightening the unmoored sensation that both Nadia and Mason are living with. But too much of it feels glossed over already; the show is in such a rush to hit plot beats that it ends up losing its patience and simply telling us what to feel. Just the fact that Mason is a family man in the present day should be enough for you to develop a connection with him, Citadel says with a shrug, without bothering to show us why. For all we know, the family could be a front, or worse, a plot device; that’s how thinly written they are.
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For all the limitless resources that went into producing it, Citadel feels disappointingly boxed-in, mainly because the Russos, in their post-Marvel years, have begun to confuse narrative scale with ambitious storytelling. They aren’t the same thing. A simple conversation between two people could be ambitious if the filmmakers play around with form and structure, and when they don’t, even a globe-trotting thriller set in an interconnected universe of pretty people could end up being Citadel.
