Citadel

It is basically televisual crack. Twists, turns, explosions, old-fashioned fisticuffs, the deployment of outrageous gadgetry from Acme’s Deus Ex Machina range, torture scenes, new locations (the Alps, London, all over the States, Paris, Spain, Iran – I may have missed a few in my delirious, glassy-eyed state), are parcelled out in one long, glorious stream.

Citadel isn’t going to change the way you look at the spy thriller, but it is going to give you all of the genre’s most-loved tropes. If you’re looking for something knottier, move along. If you just looking for a brain-numbing thrill ride, strap in and hang on. Citadel bursts out the gate, full of swagger and sex appeal.

The secret sauce of Citadel, beyond the excellent performances, is that it manages to get you interested in the plot while still plunging into absurd realms.

A sleek, glossy spy thriller that grabs the audience immediately and never loosens its grip. It’s a collection of spy movie cliches, but with all of them shined up and refurbished so that they seem almost fresh.

Either you’re gonna love this unruly behemoth or bemoan the sorry state of blockbuster entertainment. Honestly, I kind of dug it and love the pairing of the main stars who appear to be having fun at toying with each other and this “Mission: Impossible”-like scenario.

Citadel has the feel of an old-fashioned spy show, dressed up with sleek leads (“Game of Thrones’” Richard Madden and “Quantico’s” Priyanka Chopra Jonas) and state-of-the-art action. The time-bending plot certainly won’t earn many points for originality, but it’s the kind of meat-and-potatoes series that should find an attentive audience on Amazon, which has already tapped into a similar vein with “Jack Ryan” and “Reacher.”

Subtlety, be damned: if spy thrillers are your bag, this show is stylish, full throttle and knows how to have a good time.

Some great action sequences and very charismatic stars go a long way, but that might not be enough to anchor the sprawling franchise Amazon is so ambitiously building.

None of it makes any sense. But sense can be overrated. Sometimes mindless stupidity is fun.

If you’re expecting anything more than fast-faced, energetic, exciting breakneck espionage action on a grandiose scale, you may be left somewhere between disappointed and underwhelmed. For everyone else; Citadel is borderline camp, precariously cheesy, and a whole lot of fun.

Not the world-changing mega-show Amazon might have wanted, but neither is it a total misfire. Imagine an action-packed Owen Wilson spy comedy without Owen Wilson (or excessive comedy) and you won’t be too far from the mark.

This looks awfully like Madden submitting his showreel to Barbara Broccoli. One dashing ski sequence in episode three is a shameless Pierce Brosnan tribute. But all things nowadays being equal, it could just as easily be Chopra Jonas’s audition to play Bond too.

Prime Video broke the bank (a wowza $300 million) on this high-octane action series without an original thought in its empty head. But you might not notice given the sexual sparks flying between Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as amnesiac spies on a zippy thrill ride.

You can’t accuse it of being slow. Conversation is just a short bridge to the next bout of action, which tends to be brutal in the way the kids, with their video games and comic books and Quentin Tarantino movies, like it these days. (Accordingly, “Citadel” may or may not be your idea of fun.) Events are predictably unpredictable.

So far, it isn’t good enough to stick with for pure entertainment or bad enough to require rubbernecking.

“Citadel” isn’t exactly special. It’s a glossed-up action series with gadgets and twists and spectacle, but its conventional to its core.

While Citadel might check an algorithm’s boxes, it fails at being distinctive enough to linger in the memory.

“The Citadel” is formulaic and busy — splashy — yet still manages to be kind of dull.

“Citadel” has it all backward—it's entertainment that's not made for those who watch for the plot, and yet is packed with it, at the detriment of its chance to be dumb fun.

Unfortunately, in being so determined to place it among the classic spy stories, Citadel brings nothing new and, slightly ironically considering the subject material, struggles to find its own identity. The script is the biggest issue, with Chopra and Madden's scenes together quickly becoming grating as their characters attempt to out-quip each other.

There’s no excusing the dearth of novel ideas dispensed by this by-the-books affair, whose action-romance is of a rote, enervating variety, and only made bearable by the moderate chemistry shared by its two leads.

Whatever might have happened between the moment that Prime Video first cut the Citadel team its first cheque and today, though, it is clear that the series took the basic elements that made Alias so successful – beautiful lead actors, a slippery narrative full of surprises, exotic locales – and ground them all into a chunky, barely digestible paste that represents the television equivalent of a choking hazard.

The only clear fact is that Citadel, no matter how superficially it tries, is nothing more than a varnished spy thriller with little to offer beyond generic genre garbage.

The absence of substantive ideas, or even much Bond-style humor, makes Citadel feel pretty pointless. Maybe it’s possible to make a great show that appeals to everyone without offending anyone, but this isn’t it.

Unambitious cliché can at least be entertaining. Here, once again, “Citadel” falls short of the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, Citadel falls far, far short of transcendence, or even goodness. It is bland, generic, and almost shockingly cheap-looking, given the price tag.

The characters are boring; the action is blandly choreographed; the cinematography is flat; the plotting is simplistic. ... It’s so thin that one’s mind starts to wander.