A still from Citadel: Honey Bunny. (courtesy: YouTube)
Shimla: It gets going well, but the mission to keep the momentum going is a total failure. What Citadel: Honey Bunny attempts to do proves to be too much for a script that, even at its best, can only try hard to get ahead and back off. Citadel: Honey Bunny is an Indian spinoff of Amazon Prime Video’s Citadel Spies, which spawned last year’s spy thriller series starring Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden and produced by the Russo brothers. While it has action, it lacks intrigue and suspense.
The series doesn’t exactly stagnate, but it also doesn’t make us hold our breath as its action set pieces explode across the screen. It tries hard. The effort shows and spoils the experience.
The Russo brothers have reunited, this time with another successful filmmaking duo – executive producers and directors Raj and DK – but the film they have made with Varun Dhawan and Samantha makes this genre even more special.
The series moves across two timelines – 1992 and 2000. In the first leg, it has a scene in which Bollywood stuntman Bunny claims that the way actors die in Hindi films is fake and shows Honey how death happens in real life when a person gets shot.
The various ways of dying shown by Bunny in jest are scattered throughout Citadel: Honey Bunny as the action shifts between India (Bombay/Mumbai and Nainital) and Belgrade. None of them seem real or shocking.
In action films and web shows, when the heroes fire, they hit the target. This rarely happens when their opponents fire back. The latter always manage to go far off target. Things are no different in Citadel: Honey Bunny.
No matter how many times Honey is injured – she seems more vulnerable to being in the firing line than Bunny – she quickly gets back on her feet with renewed vigour. The vivacity that Samantha has given to the character is not seen throughout the series.
Varun Dhawan’s childish behaviour weakens the armour of Bunny’s invincibility that he must play even in the toughest of situations. The character has no layers and that is certainly not the actor’s fault.
Working with regular collaborators Sita Menon (Shor in the City, Go Goa Gone, Farzi) and Sumit Arora (The Family Man, Guns and Roses), Raj and DK try to create a global context for this Indian excursion into the spy universe that is struggling to find a stable docking place in the constellation of the genre that also includes an Italian expedition, Citadel: Diana.
The action scenes mounted by the directors in Belgrade, including a thrilling chase sequence through the city streets, have their moments. Sadly, they are few and far between.
As the plot progresses and the story moves between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, there is much talk of creating a better, more peaceful world and controlling the levers of global power. This is as cliched as they come with the main conflict being on ensuring that the keys to world domination do not fall into the wrong hands.
The confrontation is between an underground agency that Bunny works for when he is not performing stunts for movie stars and the agents of Citadel led by a cool, smartly dressed-up Zooni (Simran).
The six-episode series seeks an emotional core by using its quiet moments to explore family and friendship, love and loyalty, betrayal and moral dilemmas. Those parts of the series always get drowned in the noise generated by Honey and Bunny’s battle for survival in a slippery world where one wrong move could prove to be the last.
“I’m always a survivor. I’m a special person,” Honey says when Bunny expresses doubts about her ability as a spy. Her cockiness stems from the fact that she, an aspiring film actress limited to playing small roles, not only needs a purpose in life but is also sworn to protect her extremely strict school-going daughter, Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar).
Not that the little girl needs anyone’s help. Nadia is destined for bigger things after all, a glorious glimpse of which is given by Priyanka Chopra in 2023’s Citadel. The series tells the pre-origin story of agent Nadia Singh, who at one point revealed that her father Rahi Gambhir is Bunny’s namesake.
In 1992, Bunny, who has suffered a tragedy and found a “baba” figure in veteran secret agent Guru (Kay Kay Menon) after years in an orphanage, offers the struggling Honey a one-time job. It’s fraught with danger, but a girl fleeing an unhappy life in a South Indian palace has no choice but to jump into it.
That leap is a one-way street. As she continues on that path, she ends up in Belgrade in search of scientist Raghu Rao (Thalaivasal Vijay), who is believed to be the main player in a global surveillance program called Project Talvar. Secrets are revealed during the encounter, but things don’t go as expected.
Eight years later, Honey and Bunny cross paths again. This time, the battle between them turns majorly personal. Both Nadia and her mother are on the run and Bunny must find them before Zooni’s hitman Shaan (Sikander Kher) and Guru’s robber Kedar (Salim Saqib) do.
The two of them never step out of the forest as they look for a place to hide. Honey and Nadia are on the radar of the ‘bad guys’, which is the word the mother uses to tell Nadia that it’s time to go into ‘game’ mode. It’s the only way to escape danger. In the end, Honey and Bunny team up again to save Nadia from the danger she faces.
In both timelines, Bunny works with tech geek Ludo (Soham Majumdar) and Chako (Shivankit Parihar), a fearless hunk who has become a family man in the interim. The trio go into battle in full force.
Honey and Bunny’s past goes back to 1992 and the series would have done well to show the audience what both heroes endured in their childhood. Both want to erase the memories of the troubles they faced while growing up alone and unhappy.
Their backstories are dedicated to brief flashbacks that serve to explain the mindset they have adopted in adulthood, while the series focuses entirely on the little girl they have to protect at all costs from rival agents.
Citadel: Honey Bunny has two aspects. One focuses on the conventions of the spy thriller, which Raj and DK have very skillfully subverted in The Family Man.
The second film has the retro Bollywood potboiler spirit that they both celebrated and mocked in Guns N Roses. In the first case, they take no risks. In the second, too, they hold back.
Aiming at a moving target is never a good idea. It’s not surprising that Citadel: Honey Bunny is a misfire. It misses the target by miles.
Cast
Varun Dhawan, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Kay Kay Menon, Kaashvi Majmundar
Director
Krishna D.K., Raj Nidimoru
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