Cliches, loopholes abound in Citadel: Honey Bunny

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Having watched one season of the original Citadel, I was not that enamored of it but had found it fairly riveting as a spy drama and replete with technical brilliance in the action and VFX, and obviously Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ performance was sterling, all said.

Despite disappointments in recent times from both Amazon and filmmakers Raj & DK, I therefore thought that Citadel: Honey Bunny would be an engaging, if not fascinating, watch. I was therefore aghast, when midway through the six long episodes, I found that the series seemed to be going nowhere really, in terms of grip, substance in the story and the treatment. At last half-a-dozen Indian action dramas with espionage and patriotism at the core are superior. The Family Man included.

Writer-directors Raj & DK do not reach anywhere near those levels and at best touch the hyped but mediocre standards of their Farzi. What’s more, they have some of the crème-de-la-crème of Hindi film clichés, like the way Honey hides the truth from Bunny about her pregnancy because of his angry outburst, or their completely precocious kid, or the implausible goings-on even by action series standards.

The story veers between Belgrade in 1992 and India in 2000, and some loose ends are just left hanging in the air. There is clear scale, but nothing that really justifies it. And for me the worst part of the series was that Samantha Ruth Prabhu seems to be cast more because she has a fleeting resemblance in some angles to Priyanka (who played ace agent Nadia in the original, a name given here to the character who plays the two agents’ kid!) rather than because of her extraordinary performance in Raj & DK’s The Family Man Season 2! Confusing? Yup!

There are lackluster performances from Samantha (whose expressions lack variation) and Varun Dhawan, and from the rest of the cast, Simran is too wooden, while the only really impressive turn comes from Kay Kay Menon as Vishwa. The child actor Kashvi Majumdar may be good the way precocious kids were in Hindi movies from early decades but otherwise as Nadia as a character is just too unbelievable.

The story has to do with a gadget called “Armada” which can cause, we are told, nothing less than a kind of Armageddon in the wrong hands. There is an agency, Citadel, that is trying to get it, as also Vishwa, who heads a network for whom Honey and Bunny work, that we are told must get it too. Twists and turns later, in 2000, we see a clearer picture, as the rights and wrongs become evident and transparent.

And then we have the emotional angle: Honey (Samantha) is the unwed mother of Bunny’s daughter (Nadia, of course) about whom he is not aware for a very filmi reason. When Nadia meets her father for the first time, you also go back a few decades to the Hindi cinema’s emotional tropes of that bygone era, for Nadia has been a question box about her dad.

Of course, technically, the movie has glitz and glamour and pace and energy, but the soul is missing, ditto the muscle of a good patriotic action thriller.

Rating: **

Amazon Prime Video presents Amazon MGM Studios’, Gozie AGBO’s, Midnight Radio’s, PKM’s, Picrow’s & D2R Films’ Citadel: Honey Bunny Created by: Josh Appelbaum, Bryan Oh, David Weil, Anthony Russo   & Joe Russo  Produced by: Natalie Laine Williams, Alessandra Maman, Raj & DK  Directed by: Raj & DK Written by: Sumit Arora, Krishna D.K., Sita Menon, Raj Nidimoru  Music: Sachin-Jigar & Aman Pant  Starring: Varun Dhawan, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Kashvi Majmundar, Kay Kay Menon, Sikandar Kher, Saqib Saleem, Simran Bagga, Soham Majumdar, Shivankit Singh Parihar, Thalaivaasal Vijay & others