Richard Madden is apparently in the mix as the potential next James Bond and, watching his silly but sometimes enjoyable espionage thriller Citadel (Prime Video from Friday), you can see why. Citadel is, at one level, a towering inferno of dodgy CGI and fresh-from-the-microwave spy caper cliches. Yet Madden, as a super agent whose memory has been wiped, embraces the craziness with a wink and a grin. As does Priyanka Chopra Jonas, as the high-kicking former partner of Madden’s trigger-happy super-sleuth. On the evidence here, she’d make a decent Bond too.
Citadel is co-produced by the Russo Brothers. Their lasting contribution to 21st-century entertainment will be their fantastic streak of Marvel movies that culminated with the stone-cold classic Avengers: Endgame. Alas, since Avengers they’ve been on a post-Marvel comedown. They were behind the dreary Netflix blockbuster The Gray Men. They now follow up that humdrum affair with the spirited, though entirely preposterous Citadel.
Hang on, though. Isn’t preposterous what we want from our undercover romps? Well no – not judging by Daniel Craig’s James Bond and the hard-punching Bourne films. But perhaps the genre is about to pivot back to the olden days of ejector seats and ballpoint pens that could transform into lasers if twisted correctly. That’s certainly the idea with Citadel. It opens with a ridiculous set-piece in a train crossing the Alps and from there orbits ever-expanding circles of ludicrousness.
That absurdity comes at a price. Amazon is pumping an eye-watering $300 million into the first season. You can see the money on the screen, though not necessarily in a positive way. That deafening mountaintop shoot-out with which the action begins, for instance, looks like a PlayStation 4 cutscene. It’s loud and kinetic and about as authentic as plastic flowers from Ikea.
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The big concept behind Citadel is that it will serve as a mother ship to a number of regional spin-offs. There are plans for various Citadel miniseries set in India and Italy for instance, though you imagine even Amazon at its most spendthrift would blanch at bringing the franchise to Ireland. The first three instalments would focus on the spies trying to find accommodation only for them to end up commuting in from Portarlington.
Still, whatever the future holds, as a slice of old-school Bond silliness the show just about delivers. In addition to Madden as the free-punching Mason Kane – with a name like that he was never going to be an actuary – and Chopra as the glamorous Nadia Sinh, it stars a tightly wound Stanley Tucci as Citadel honcho Bernard Orlick.
He is introduced in a sequence in which he invites captured agents to play a card game and then shoots them in the back of the head. It says something for the ripple of hysteria running through Citadel that an execution scene featuring a family card game rates as merely the fourth or fifth daftest thing in the first episode.
Espionage fans may consider it too ripe: more way-hey! than John le Carré. But if Madden wishes to revive the gonzo James Bond of Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan then this is the perfect springboard.
