Review 686: Citadel (Season 1)

  

Global spy agency Citadel has fallen, and agents Mason Kane (Richard Madden) and Nadia Sinh's (Priyanka Chopra) memories were wiped clean. Now the powerful syndicate, Manticore, is rising in the void. Can these Citadel agents recollect their past and summon the strength to fight back?

Citadel is a show about alter egos and duel identities: All the characters wear masks. They all have a little bit of blood on their hands and have done complicated things to progress agendas. They are also people who have agendas that are sometimes worthy and noble and other times subversive and self-interested.

Citadel, itself, is an organisation that's meant to be the safeguard for the whole world and it acts as such by having representatives from all over the world working together. It supposedly could exist in the real world and none of us would know about it but the organisation itself is so shrouded in double crossings and dubious dealings and it's ideals so nonsensical it's just not believable.

What are the characters going to believe? Who's telling the truth? How far will you go to find answers? These are all questions that have been addressed in other, better films in the genre and executed much better.

This is largely a humourless affair and by that I mean the majority of this shows attempts at humor fall flat.

I'm sure there's great action here, but thanks to extremely sharp cutting and awkward camera angles, the geography of those scenes are very tough to follow. The shows director Newton Thomas Sigel (who previously served as a DP on all of now disgraced director Bryan Singer's films) has learned from better films in the spy genre that directors sometimes use quick cutting, but he hasn't learned why.

the score by Alex Belcher is generic spy gunk. The cinematography is gorgeous  In fact, Citadel gives off the impression of being a glossy, big budget version of The Bourne Trilogy.

In spite of these results, Amazon have already renewed this show for a second season and are planning spin-offs set in the Italian Alps, India, Spain and Mexico. If this is the level of complexity and originality that we can expect from this “Spyverse”, then we are off to a terrible start. 

Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra share no onscreen chemistry and they seem to be acting in front of background projections of each other. Alone, Mason Kane and Nadia Sinh are at the top of their game. But together, they really come alive however without that spark between them, they fail to make a big impression.

According to Madden, Mason is a very complicated man. Two very different characters in the same body. They are both the same man in lots of different ways, but each version of him gives him  pull out different aspects of him and who he is as a person. One of them carries a lot of scars from the past and a lot of trauma and the other one doesn't carry any baggage. He just has a whole bunch of unknown to him.

Ashleigh Cummings is given the thankless task of being the cliched devoted wife playing Abby Conroy, Mason/Kyle's other half. The revalation that she was a fellow Citadel agent didn't help matters.

Lesley Manville, in a truly dreadful performance, is simply not credible or threatening as the main antagonist and face of the Menticore organisation, Dahlia Archer. I never once believed that she could maintain control of this secret organisation or the operation she was running.