1.5 Stars (out of 4)
Watch Citadel: Honey Bunny on Amazon Prime
A streaming franchise with multiple international spin-offs is intriguing in theory, but not so much in practice, at least in the case of Citadel: Honey Bunny. There’s barely enough material in the new Indian spin-off to support a feature-length film, let alone a six-episode series with a nearly five-hour runtime.
Citadel: Honey Bunny is a prequel to the original series created by the Russo brothers and an origin story for Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s character. Surprisingly, Chopra Jonas doesn’t make a cameo at the beginning or end of Honey Bunny to make that connection explicit. Instead, the show creators count on you to remember her character’s name: Nadia.
This new series flashes back to India in 2000, where 7-year-old Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar) is on the run with her mother Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu). Honey is a former spy waiting for her past to catch up with her, training Nadia to fight, hide, and run when the time comes.
Honey’s own entry into the world of espionage happened in 1992. With her Bollywood acting career floundering, a stuntman named Bunny (Varun Dhawan) hired her for an unorthodox gig: distract a rich guy in a hotel bar long enough for Bunny and his colleagues to grab something from his room. When Bunny’s crew fails, she offers to nab the item herself, and thus a spy is born.
That’s about where Episode 1 leaves off and the descent into boredom begins. Episodes 2 and 3 are primarily filler, cutting between the 1992 and 2000 timelines. Real forward momentum resumes in Episode 4, continuing a slow build until a very entertaining finale with some truly exciting action sequences.
It’s not just that little happens through the middle of the series. It’s that there’s nothing fun about it. The action scenes are forgettable, as are the settings. The 1992 timeline sends Honey & Bunny’s crew to Belgrade to recover a piece of all-powerful tech. Given the geographical, architectural, and cultural diversity within India itself, taking the action out of the country is a disappointing choice.
Worst of all, the acting is monotone from an impressive cast that — besides the two popular leads — includes Kay Kay Menon as Baba, head of Bunny’s spy organization; Saqib Saleem as Baba’s flunky KD; and Sikander Kher as the rival spy Shaan.
The most obvious explanation for the show’s flat tone is network interference, because the cast is much better than they are allowed to be (at least until the last couple of episodes). There’s a generic “OTT spy drama” feel to Honey Bunny, as if the cast and crew were shoved into a mold with no room for them to utilize their unique talents.
Same goes for Raj & DK, who directed the series and co-wrote it with Sita Menon. There’s little of their signature wit until very late in the proceedings. It feels like they created the show in reverse, making sure to end with a great finale but running out of time to flesh out the rest of the story. Subplots and character development points are introduced but not explored, despite long stretches where not much happens.
Another big reason why this isn’t Raj & DK’s best work is that the whole series is terribly lit. They rely on natural lighting that often leaves the actors in shadows or backlit. It’s frequently hard to make out character’s faces, even during pivotal emotional moments. I kept squinting at the screen, not that it helped.
The (probable) network-mandated homogenizing squashes a lot of what could have been good about the series — and a lot of what would have made it feel very Indian. Though the 1992 timeline starts on the set of a Bollywood film, the location is abandoned after the first episode in favor of the Belgrade jaunt. How fun might it have been to imagine rival spy agencies operating within a film industry that was the domain of organized crime at the time?
Then there’s the waste of talent. Especially given how slow and dull Citadel: Honey Bunny is through its midpoint, I can’t imagine it winning over many new fans who only watched because of the Citadel name. Will they be inspired to seek out any of the actors’ other projects? Will they watch Raj & DK’s other Amazon Prime series — Farzi and The Family Man — after this? I doubt it.
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