Citadel Review: The Russo Brothers' Spy Series Is A Bourne Ripoff With No Identity
In the run-up to the release of the Amazon Prime Video spy series he produced, "Citadel," filmmaker and armchair Nostradamus Anthony Russo made the preventable mistake of becoming Film Twitter's main character. When asked about the future of AI, Russo predicted that emerging technologies could soon "engineer storytelling" to a viewer's preference and curate a personalized storytelling journey. What "Citadel" poses is perhaps a more immediately insidious possibility — a world where humans writing television have already internalized algorithmic consumption patterns to produce something robotic and mechanical of their own volition.
If you've heard anything about "Citadel" by now, their years-in-the-making spy saga announced before the release of "Avengers: Endgame," it probably has something to do with its troubled production and bloated budget. This tale of a cross-national network of agents devoted to averting major global crises with no fidelity to a single government also represents the first in a series of building blocks. From its greenlight, Amazon announced its intentions for the flagship show to branch out for spinoffs in Italy and India.
If this feels like a discussion about commerce more than content, that's only because there is so little of the latter to critique from the first half of "Citadel" made available to reviewing press prior to its premiere. The show really does not even bother to gussy up the business imperatives central to its very existence. This is not television. It's a template that cannot deign to disguise profit opportunities as plot points. The Marvel connector pieces that the Russos skillfully learned to sell as satisfactory ends unto themselves feel self-contained compared to this show.
Bourne to be mild
The first three episodes of "Citadel" introduce viewers to Richard Madden's Mason Kane, a debonair American agent mid-assignment on a train shooting through the Italian Alps. The mission and the agency as a whole get compromised, and Mason's ejection from the locomotive leaves him with a case of retrograde amnesia that erases any knowledge of his life and work. Jump to eight years later, and Mason has started fresh with a wife and daughter in the Oregon countryside.
Mason endures only the occasional clichéd pang of remembrance that his life once meant something different. In these moments of frustration that recall the brainwashed hero of the "Bourne" trilogy struggling to regain the memory of his past, the difference between a serviceable leading man like Madden and a true actor such as Matt Damon emerges. Madden is all blankness, forced to let what is shown or told to his character define his history. Unlike more capable performers in similar roles, no traces of that former self peek through his brooding facade.
Mason's ignorance all comes to a screeching halt when agents descend upon his house, bringing him back into the fold by way of his former superior Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci). This last holdout from the Citadel program refreshes his former agent that their network was once the last thing stopping Manticore, a cabal of rich people from profiting off catastrophic events to entrench their own lofty positions. He spurs further action by suggesting that the botched mission that cost Mason his past life stems from a mole the agency's foes planted within their ranks. Bernard quickly establishes that the former spy still maintains his muscle memory of his former profession ... and supplements that by reuploading the actual memories he and other agents could download onto a server.
He's convinced of the need to take on the lofty opponent, which is chaired by alternative fact-spewing British diplomat Dahlia Archer (a delightfully hammy Lesley Manville). But first, Mason needs to reunite with his former colleague who herself has left Citadel behind. His first impossible mission is to convince Priyanka Chopra Jonas' Nadia Singh, his former professional — and later revealed to be romantic — partner, of her past affiliations and urgent need to rejoin the fight. The series makes this all too easy a task given how it defines Nadia's role from the prologue in which she suffers the same fate as Mason. She flirts; he fights. She's told lipstick is her greatest weapon; he's shown using his imposing physicality to subdue adversaries.
It's too bad that Madden and Jonas are all smoldering and no sensuality in selling this dull duo. They're an on-screen couple only a publicist could love, the kind of pairing that only makes sense if one considers magazine covers and Instagram followers as conduits for chemistry. The duo is already so impossibly beautiful that it feels weird inviting them into the living room — their dazzling good looks feel more in line with the kind of spectacle that belongs on the silver, not the small, screen. And yet "Citadel" does them no favors by leaving them hanging out to dry with ridiculous lines like "I've been known to leave an impression" that only serve to expose the blatant insincerity of the limited sparks flying.
A show of its era
/Film's Erin Brady calculated the the "Citadel" production costs were so high that each minute cost a whopping $1.25 million. And at moments in "Citadel," you can feel that — and in a good way. At that insane price tag, perhaps the series' action set pieces should be a little more distinctive or memorable. But they're not necessarily boring or shoddily executed.
Where "Citadel" stumbles is in its complete inability to string those centerpiece sequences together to further plot or character. There's no mechanism to tie these moments together, though, because there is no interest to do so. With streaming services analyzing viewer retention at such a granular level, a show like this has no incentive to invest in the hard work of a narrative arc. It's merely a pleasure delivery system, streamlined and standardized.
What becomes evident in just the first half of "Citadel" is that this entire enterprise is a depressing testament to the bloat that defines streaming services struggling to maintain subscribers and scale. It's a six-episode series sent to tell a story that a two-hour feature could easily convey. The show's need to draw out every beat proves maddening to watch. It takes twice as long in duration to provide half as much information as a film would — and with neither narrative economy nor flair, to boot. When it tries to operate in a more episodic mode, such as toggling into an obvious B-plot with supporting characters, the scenes fizzle from obvious underdevelopment.
With the show bearing the name of three creators in Bryan Oh, David Weil, and Josh Appelbaum — the latter of whom the Russos fired as showrunner — "Citadel" bears all the hallmarks of the entertainment of the brothers as its true artistic north star. From the banal banter to the feigned topicality that has the sophistication of gleaning the news from tweet headlines, it will not take a forensic kit to find their fingerprints all over the finished product. They've perfected hollowing out the tools of cinema until the content itself is nothing more than a sales pitch for future gratification that may never arrive.
After enduring the schematic storytelling of "Citadel," Anthony Russo's idea for AI-guided content creation sounds less like a threat. Comparatively, it sounds like a treat.
"Citadel" premieres April 28, 2023, on Prime Video.