Citadel: this spy thriller is a rip-roaring, nonstop actionfest
I’ve always wondered what would happen to me if a blacked-out SUV screeched up and someone yelled: “GET IN — NOW! NO TIME TO EXPLAIN!” I know I would be annoying. I know my actions would ruin everyone else in the car’s day. “No explanation? At all? Come on. A hint? Come on!”
Two armed guards in leather bomber jackets bundle me into the back seat and floor it, but it’s around 2.30pm and I realise I’ve not eaten lunch. “Guys, how long’s this drive going to be?” Everyone’s mad at me because the spy agency they work for has a sprawling base across a countryside mansion and that’s a four-hour drive out of town, and they all had lunch at 1pm like normal people, so everyone’s furious when I make them pull over in a service station so I can get a claggy egg mayo baguette and a poncho (the weather has turned). My phone was on like 11% battery when I got bundled into the car, and even though I can sense a very tense atmosphere I really do have to charge it before it turns itself off, but all the guards have iPhones when I need an Android charger and it’s a whole other thing. Eventually, obviously, they put a matte black bag over my head and shoot me in the skull. Someone else can help with this shit.
That, I suppose, is why I am not in Citadel (out Friday), the new Prime Video thriller series from David Weil (creator of anti-Nazi vigilante drama Hunters) and executive produced by the Russo brothers (Arrested Development, Community, and every megagrossing MCU movie ever made). They went with Richard Madden for the main role, instead, as the phenomenally irritatingly named Mason Kane, who smartmouths his way around, opposite the far more composed Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Nadia Sinh. I’m just checking the spoilers list as to what I can actually say about the series, and … ah. I think I can say they are spies?
I think that’s OK. And the agency they are spying for is called Citadel. And the thing with Citadel is, well, it fell. And eight years later – without anyone involved even ageing one single day – they have to reunite and … Well I don’t really know what they’re up to, and I’ve seen half of the six-episode series. But what definitely happens is people keep saying “Citadel” a lot.
Whether you enjoy Citadel or not is going to depend on your ability to suspend disbelief, but also on your own personal threshold for the modern language of action movie banter. The series starts on a train (nothing like an action film train, is there? You never seem to get this kind of action, and also seat space, on a Pendolino), with Nadia talking into her own ear and slinking around on a mission to catch a uranium dealer before his Earth-threatening arms deal can go down. But, uh oh, Mason Kane (it’s funny every time. It is funny that they called the cool spy “Mason Kane” every single time) is also here, and he and Nadia seem to have some awkward chemistry-shaped history with one another. “Oh yeah – how is Operation Bullshit?” he asks, before her target starts to move and the action unfolds. This is going to make you feel one of two things: like you’re on a riproaring non-stop actionfest as it pelts through the Alps; or, simply, a dull metallic feeling in your stomach that you can’t shift. I tended to get the latter.
But you know what? I didn’t hate it.
There’s a lot to like about Citadel, not least the inspired decision to cast Stanley Tucci as the wise-cracking comms guy who knows everything and has six computer monitors on at all times. Citadel
leans hard on spy-y tropes, and I think I’m OK with that: two grunting identical twins who fight in silence; an arms deal in a shipyard; some completely unnecessary tech and an astonishing number of tracking devices; a British villain (Lesley Manville, who is having a hell of a time up there); nobody ever passes anything to each other, they always just throw it; a trip to Zurich for some reason!; someone saying “sorry about the theatrics” once an episode. But it absolutely zips along, it doesn’t take its MacGuffin quest too seriously and Madden is exactly fine as an airport thriller-style haunted spy who just wants his family back.
Listen, we all like to pretend we’re smart people, don’t we? You’re probably going to do the crossword after this and feel really smug. But sometimes we’re just little lizards who need to watch two hot people flirt on a train before they do some fun choreographed gunplay, and that’s all right, too. Citadel will – very adequately – scratch that itch.