Citadel review – this absurdly fun spy thriller is televisual crack

With the arrival at last of high-octane, international spy actionfest Citadel after a troubled gestation (commissioned before the pandemic, rejected pilot episode, replacement of the original director, radical overhaul), Prime Video is now the producer of the two most expensive streamed series of all time. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power cost $465m (and that’s clearly without spending a cent on the title) and the new six-episode drama on the block reportedly comes in at somewhere north of $250m. And that’s clearly without spending a cent on the script.

Is it worth it? You betcha. It’s Mission: Impossible meets The Bourne Identity meets James Bond while glancing off Indiana Jones a few times along its irresistible way.

It opens, rather like a Hollywood remake of Bodyguard, with Richard Madden having loo-based traumas on a train. This time he is more chiselled, because people from outside the UK are going to see him, and doesn’t quite save the day. This time he plays Mason Kane (actually, they might have spent 10 dollars on the name) an agent for Citadel, an independent global espionage network comprising people tired of political corruption and criminal infiltration screwing up ordinary espionage and leaving the little people unprotected.

His partner (and ex-wife) is the permanently pouting Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), who looks like Jessica Rabbit but who is a very good agent, perhaps even better than Kane, and everybody respects her and takes her very seriously OK so the producers hope they’ve done their bit and got away with it overall, ’kay?

The train blows up because Citadel has been betrayed by one of its own to Manticore, a global crime syndicate fed up with the good guys cutting into their time and profits. We cut to eight years later and our agents are living normal lives in separate cities with absolutely no memory of their previous existence as a hot married agent couple being blown up on trains. But when Manticore steals a caseful of Citadel’s supertopsecret secrets that would enable them to establish a new world order, the remnants of Citadel gather for one last fight. And by “remnants” I mean Stanley Tucci as supertopCitadelagent Bernard Orlick, who tracks down Kane, kidnaps him and his family – but in a nice way, because good guys, remember – and launches him on a mission that will reunite him with Nadia, putting him very much in the way of Sinhing while he’s happily married to a normal woman called, I believe, Abby Wifewife (Ashleigh Cummings).

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. And just when you’re thinking “I could do with a quiet moment right now”, up pops Lesley Manville having the time of her life as evil ambassador Dahlia Archer (a nickel for the name but they had to build the English Gloss generator from scratch for $17m) to deliver a precise, devastating speech, demolish a journalist or order someone’s brain stem severed while she clips roses or finishes a light breakfast.

This version of Citadel is the mothership – there are to be various spin-offs tailored to different countries, many of which have already started filming. I can only hope the addictive magic translates each time. Everyone deserves to have this much absurd fun.