Citadel: Honey Bunny Review – The Series Misses The Bull’s Eye By Miles

It hits the ground running all right but the mission of sustaining the momentum is an abject failure. Much of what Citadel: Honey Bunny attempts to do proves way too much for a script that, even at its best, can only laboriously inch its way forward – and backwards. Citadel: Honey Bunny is an Indian spinoff of Amazon Prime Video’s Citadel Spyverse that was birthed last year in an espionage thriller series fronted by Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden and executive produced by the Russo brothers. While it has its share of action, it runs low on intrigue and suspense.

The series does not exactly go down in flames but neither does it have us holding our breath as its action set pieces explode on screen. It tries hard. The effort shows and mars the experience.

The Russo brothers are on board again, this time alongside another successful filmmaking pair – executive producers and directors Raj & DK – but the fare that they produce with Varun Dhawan and Samantha playing the titular agents makes heavy weather of the genre.

The series plays out in two timelines – 1992 and 2000. In the earlier phase, it has a sequence in which Bollywood stuntman Bunny asserts that the way actors die in Hindi films is fake and proceeds to show Honey how death occurs in real life when a man is shot.

The various ways of dropping dead that Bunny demonstrates in jest are strewn all across Citadel: Honey Bunny as the action alternates between India (Bombay/Mumbai and Nainital) and Belgrade. None of them look either real or startling.

In action movies and web shows, when the protagonists shoot, they hit the target. That is rarely the case when their adversaries return fire. The latter always manage to go way off the mark. Things are no different in Citadel: Honey Bunny.

No matter how often Honey – she seems more vulnerable than Bunny to being in the firing line – is wounded, she is quickly back on her feet with renewed vigour. The vitality that Samantha lends to the character does not quite find its way into the series as a whole.

Varun Dhawan’s boyish demeanour tends to undermine the armour of invincibility that Bunny is supposed to sport in the most difficult of situations. The character has no layers and that of course isn’t 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 & Gulaabs), Raj & DK seek to create a global context for this Indian excursion into the spy universe that has been struggling to find a steady docking space in the genre constellation that also includes an Italian foray, Citadel: Diana.

The action scenes that the directors mount in Belgrade, including an exciting chase sequence through the streets of the city, have their moments. They are sadly too few and far between.

As the plot unfolds 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. That is as cliched as they come with the principal struggle hinging on ensuring that the key to world domination does not fall into the wrong hands.

The confrontations take place between an underground agency that Bunny works for when he isn’t performing stunts for movie stars and the agents of Citadel led by a stoic, smartly attired-Zooni (Simran).

The six-episode series looks in vain for an emotional core by utilizing its quieter moments to explore family and friendship, love and loyalty, betrayal and moral dilemmas. Those portions of the series are always drowned out by the din generated by Honey and Bunny’s fight for survival in a slippery world where one false step could prove to be the last.

“I always survive. I am an exclusive piece,” Honey preens when Bunny expresses scepticism about her ability to make it as a spy. Her cockiness stems from the fact that she, an aspiring movie actress reduced to playing bit parts, not only needs a purpose in life but is also foresworn to protecting her precociously tough school-going daughter, Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar).

Not that the little girl needs any hand-holding. Nadia is after all destined for bigger things, grand glimpses of which Priyanka Chopra provided in 2023’s Citadel. This series tells the pre-origin story of agent Nadia Sinh, who at one point had revealed that her father is Rahi Gambhir. That is Bunny’s name.

In 1992, Bunny, who has lived down a tragedy and found a “Baba” figure in seasoned secret agent Guru (Kay Kay Menon) after years of living in an orphanage, offers the struggling Honey a one-off job. It is fraught with danger but the girl, running from an unhappy life in a South Indian royal palace, has no option but to leap right in.

That leap is a one-way street. As she travels down that path, she ends up in Belgrade in pursuit of a scientist Raghu Rao (Thalaivasal Vijay), who is believed to be the key player in a global surveillance programme called Project Talwar. Secrets tumble forth in the course of the encounter but things do not quite end as intended.

Eight years later, Honey and Bunny’s paths cross again. This time around, the war they wage becomes primarily personal. Both Nadia and her mother are on the run and Bunny must find them before Zooni’s hitman Shaan (Sikandar Kher) and Guru’s loose cannon Kedar (Salim Saqeeb) can corner them.

The duo is never out of the woods as they look for places to hide. Honey and Nadia are on the radar of ‘bad men’, that is the term the mother uses to tell Nadia that it is time switch to ‘play’ mode. That is the only way to stay out of harm’s way. The action eventually boils down to Honey and Bunny forming a team again to ward off the danger that Nadia faces.

In both timelines, Bunny operates with tech geek Ludo (Soham Majumdar) and Chako (Shivankit Parihar), an intrepid hunk who has in the interim become a family man, on his side. The trio ventures into combat all guns blazing.

Honey and Bunny’s pasts go beyond 1992 and the series would have done well to give the audience a little more of what the two protagonists endured as children. Both seek to erase memories of the troubles they have had to contend with growing up lonely and unhappy.

Their backstories are devoted to brief flashbacks that serve to just about explain the mindsets that they have carried into adulthood, while the series squarely focuses on the spunky little girl who they must protect at all costs from rival agents.

Citadel: Honey Bunny has two facets to it. One centres on the conventions of the spy thriller, which Raj & DK so skillfully turned on their head in The Family Man.

The other exudes the sort of retro Bollywood potboiler spirit that the duo at once celebrated and lampooned in Guns & Gulaabs. On the former count, they take no risks. On the latter too, they hold back.

Aiming at a moving target is never a good idea. It is hardly surprising that Citadel: Honey Bunny is a misfire. It misses the bull’s eye by miles.