For the past month and change, I’ve been living with a secret. Like a special agent, I was sent abroad on assignment and I discovered something monumental. I didn’t retrieve the plans for a weapon of mass destruction, but I did preview the first foreign installments in Prime Video‘s Citadel franchise. What I discovered was that the preposterously-named Citadel: Honey Bunny freaking rules. In fact, the India-based spy thriller is one of my favorite shows of the whole damn year.
Citadel: Honey Bunny is the third installment in Prime Video’s ambitious international spy franchise, Citadel. The original Citadel premiered in Spring 2023 and introduced Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as super spies who find themselves struck by amnesia. As the series went on, its slick set up found itself undone by increasingly silly plot twists. Last month, the Milan-based Citadel: Diana, debuted, proving there was still some life in the Russo Brothers-produced franchise. Citadel: Diana was mature, moody, and buoyed by leading lady Matilda De Angelis’s beguiling performance. However, it’s Citadel: Honey Bunny that manages to finally score Prime Video its first creative home run in the Citadel universe.
Citadel: Honey Bunny was created by Indian television powerhouses Raj & DK and their long-time writing partner Sita R. Menon. The series pivots between two central timelines, one in 2000 and the other in 1992. This allows Citadel: Honey Bunny to embrace the rough and tumble, lo-fi action of films like 2002’s The Bourne Identity while staying within the otherwise hyper-stylized and tech-heavy Citadel universe. This setting also lets Citadel: Honey Bunny explore how evil spy network Manticore emerged on Citadel’s watch…by telling the story of how the parents of Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s Nadia Sinh fell in love.
We first meet the pint-sized Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar) nodding asleep on a motorbike as her mother Honey (Samantha) takes her to school in the gorgeous Himalayan resort town of Nainital in 2000. From the jump, Citadel: Honey Bunny establishes the single mother’s relationship with her precocious kid as loving, but strange. (Lorelei Gilmore wasn’t exactly telling Rory to make sure she threw the first punch in any fight, if you catch my drift.) Soon, though, as Honey finds herself the target of “bad men” who wish to kidnap both her and Nadia, we realize why the retired agent has raised her daughter to think like a spy. Mother and cub are soon on the run, but they have help on the way.
Back in 1992 Bombay â the show correctly calls the same city Mumbai in its 2000 scenes â we meet Bunny (Varun Dhawan). He’s a talented, good-hearted stuntman and one of the few bright spots in then-struggling actress Honey’s life. When Honey finds herself homeless, she accepts a unique side job from her friend. Bunny and his pals need Honey to be a literal honey trap, luring an important businessman away from his plush hotel room for a half hour so they can infiltrate it to retrieve a disc. Honey not only excels at the work, but seems to enjoy it, going so far as to volunteer to drug their mark to steal the disc herself. When the operation goes awry, Bunny has to save her, revealing the stuntman as an incredibly deadly fighter and actual secret agent.
What makes Citadel: Honey Bunny so intoxicating is how it not only cheekily flits between the trademark tropes of east and west action pictures, but also genres themselves. Trailers for Citadel: Honey Bunny clearly emphasize the show’s unrelenting action sequences, but my absolute favorite part of the show was the romance. The chemistry between Samantha and Varun Dhawan is vibrating on a nuclear level. The sequence in Episode 2 that sets up their first kiss is so slyly seductive that I’ve officially gone back and rewatched over and over again, like it’s the carriage scene from Bridgerton Season 3 or something. It’s just one of many moments in which Citadel: Honey Bunny improbably fires on all cylinders. Whether it’s action, intrigue, humor, or heartache, this show nails it all.
If I have nitpicks about the series, they are few and easy to overlook. Citadel: Honey Bunny leans heavily into the omnipresent orange and blue lighting schemes that seem to blight modern prestige television (and dog Decider’s resident recapper Sean T. Collins to no end!). However, given the show’s period piece aesthetic, I can deal with it as a “throwback” vibe. While most of the characters are incredibly complex and vividly rendered, precious little time is given in developing important side characters. Finally, Citadel: Honey Bunny ends on a massively abrupt cliffhanger. Similar to House of the Dragon Season 2, it sets the stage for an epic battle only to cut to black.
All of which is to say that I’m upset that Citadel: Honey Bunny left me wanting more. More hero shots of Varun Dhawan looking like an actual warrior god about to strike, more moments of Samantha being a stone cold motherfucker of a mother, and much more time with Honey, Bunny, and little Nadia. Citadel: Honey Bunny is a hell of an entertaining ride that you should not overlook.
All six episodes of Citadel: Honey Bunny premiere on Prime Video on Thursday, November 7.
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