‘Citadel: Honey Bunny’ Flips the Script on the Sexy-Spy Franchise

The word “Citadel” isn’t spoken until the very end of the fourth episode of Citadel: Honey Bunny, the latest entry in Prime Video’s attempt to will an international franchise into existence by any means necessary. It’s almost as if the new show — based in India, developed by Sita R Menon, and directed by the Indian filmmaker duo known as Raj & DK — is reluctant to embrace its own title, or at least to openly acknowledge its connection to the misbegotten first entry in the series, which debuted to scathing reviews and public indifference last year. This is a feature, not a bug. While one of the spinoff’s characters is a younger version of Nadia, the spy that Priyanka Chopra Jonas plays on the Citadel mothership, a viewer could watch Honey Bunny without knowing any other shows (including the recent Italy-set Citadel: Diana) exist, and have no difficulty following the plot.

More importantly, they’d probably enjoy the raucous, slickly entertaining Honey Bunny even more if they didn’t once have to think about whatever Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden were up to on the earlier series. It’s both a much better example of what original recipe Citadel was trying to do, and a franchise entry that for the most part manages to function independently of its siblings.

The six-episode first season splits its time between the year 2000, when Nadia is a grade schooler (played by Kashvi Majmundar), living a perpetual fugitive lifestyle with her ex-spy mother Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu); and 1992, when Honey is a struggling actress who discovers her stuntman pal Bunny (Varun Dhawan) is in fact a secret agent who works on action movies as a side hustle. Where too many modern dramas handicap themselves with unnecessarily out-of-sequence storytelling, the parallel timeline structure works for Honey Bunny, because there’s action and intrigue in both eras, rather than the fun stuff being frontloaded at the expense of coherence.

There are also lively dynamics in each period. In 1992, Honey is a rookie agent, learning the ropes from Bunny in ways that draw deliberate parallels to their movie work. Bunny is introduced doing an absurd wire-work stunt involving a motorcycle jump, in one of many instances of the show leaning into the ridiculous, larger-than-life nature of its main story. (It’s not dissimilar to the Gosling/Blunt Fall Guy, only with much higher stakes in exchange for a seemingly smaller budget.) And he and Bunny do some of their earliest flirtation while he tries to teacher her how to more convincingly act like she’s just been shot. The two are mostly separate in 2000, for reasons that are eventually explained, but the way that Nadia has been trained from an early age to do counter-surveillance and other spy tasks creates an appealingly unconventional bond between her and Honey; Bunny, meanwhile, has some endearing hangout moments with longtime allies Chacko (Shivankit Singh Parihar) and Ludo (Soham Majumdar). Prabhu and Dhawan have chemistry for days whenever they’re together, and the only times the storytelling really bogs down is in the rare occasions — mostly early in the finale — where people remember to talk about the Citadel itself(*).

(*) There are also a couple of apparent murders in the finale that feel much too dark for the overall frothy tone of the series. But they’re presented with enough ambiguity that it shouldn’t be difficult to undo them in the event of a second season.  

None of this is earth-shattering work, but it’s amazing how far simple storytelling competence can take you. The leads and their loved ones quickly pop as people, so it feels worth investing in them whenever the story takes a new turn. And Raj & DK keep both the plot and the mayhem moving at an exciting clip. There’s not a lot of action in the early episodes, but it’s always well-staged when it happens. And then the finale features a marvelous “oner” (a sequence presented as if it was shot in a single take) where, for nearly eight minutes, Honey and Bunny move from room to room in a sprawling mansion, taking on an army of opponents with guns, fists, explosives, and whatever other weapons are handy. Even if the rest of the season was less thrilling, this climactic battle might make the journey feel worth it; because the rest of it is so solid and sure of itself, it instead plays as a proper culmination of what’s come before.

Amazon came to this whole Citadel concept in the most bass-ackwards way possible, and the flagship show clearly suffered for that. But “sexy spies have adventures” is a durable and elastic concept that can work fine regardless of what else it’s attached to. You don’t need to have watched a second of the other two shows in order to appreciate Honey Bunny. But hopefully, if more Citadels get made, they’ll learn a lesson or three from how well this one functions as a largely standalone tale. People don’t love franchises because they’re interconnected. They love that the individual parts are good.

All six episodes of Citadel: Honey Bunny begin streaming November 7 on Prime Video. I’ve seen the whole season.

From Rolling Stone US.