Joe Russo almost broke Twitter when he said that technology is moving with such momentum that we should be expect AI-generated films and TV shows in the very near future. Not only was kind of a questionable thing to say with a potential writer’s strike looming on the horizon, but, well, recent Russo productions like “The Gray Man” haven’t exactly given anyone hope for the future of screenwriting. Maybe he was setting us up for lowered expectations regarding what he had his name on next.
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Watching Prime Video’s atrocious “Citadel,” produced by the Russo brothers, might lead someone to believe that Russo was already using A.I. to produce his shows and films because this one feels created by and for the algorithm. It has gorgeous stars doing action-y things that should remind viewers of projects like “The Bourne Legacy” or even “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” but are more reminiscent of this bland era of high-budget streaming products that feel more like CGI creations than flesh-and-blood people (think the recent Apple TV+ dud “Ghosted” for an equivalent lack of personality). Everyone involved with “Citadel” is too talented to be sucked into this bland noise generator, a show that will likely make enough money for Prime because of its sexy stars and international appeal but will do nothing to help the company’s recently reported trouble with carving out an identity for viewers.
Richard Madden, who has proved he can do compelling TV action like this before in the far-superior “Bodyguard,” stars as Mason Kane, who is introduced on a speeding train in the Italian Alps in the show’s opening scene. He banters and flirts with a fellow spy named Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jones), who is being given orders remotely from a handler named Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci). Kane and Sinh are members of something called Citadel, which is later revealed to be an independent organization of super-spies. Orlick actually says they have “helped shape every event for good in the last hundred years.” (Who pays for that?) They’re the spies who keep world governments from collapsing and stop the bad guys from winning. It’s almost like someone wrote “Robin Hood meets 007 meets Bourne” on a whiteboard, and that’s how we got here.
Of course, every spy yin needs its yang, and the opposite of Citadel is something called Manticore—the mean spies if you will. And in that opening scene, Manticore has effectively burned the entire Citadel operation from the top down. After some fighting and some shooting, the train crashes in a poorly-rendered CGI explosion, plunging Kane into the water below in a shot that’s so Bourne that Doug Liman should get a residual check. Because guess what? Flash forward eight years and Kane has no memory of ever being a part of Citadel. He’s quickly put together a nuclear family with a wife (Ashleigh Cummings) and a daughter (Caoilinn Springall), but he keeps having flashes of Nadia’s face. And he wonders where all of those scars on his body came from. He’s probably pretty wicked with a knife in the kitchen too.
Before you know it, Kane is back in the field, Orlick is barking orders, and—not really a spoiler unless you thought she’d just be in the prologue—Nadia is back on the scene too. A magical suitcase that can destroy any remaining Citadel members and happens to have all of the nuclear codes in the world is in play and Orlick, Sinh, and Kane have to get it before Manticore and the evil Dahlia Archer (Lesley Manville) beat them to it. Commence shooting and punching between drone shots of international locales.
All the nuclear codes are in one suitcase? It’s the kind of question that one only asks when escapist entertainment isn’t working. Audiences for action movies are willing to suspend disbelief if the payoff is worth the cost, but “Citadel” never closes the sale, content to hop around the world in a manner that’s designed to show off beautiful people in beautiful settings who are trying to save the world, but that’s the superficial extent of it. Through the three episodes sent to press, there’s almost no reason to care about anything that’s happening other than when the too-talented-for-this Tucci and Manville get to share the screen together, and even those scenes are too brief to gain any momentum in a show that’s constantly zipping away every time something gets interesting. The one benefit of this shallow storytelling is a refreshingly light runtime, with each episode coming in closer to 40 minutes than the 60 that’s so common in the bloated streaming era. Although “at least it’s not too long” is pretty faint praise.
But that’s really about it. The characters are boring; the action is blandly choreographed; the cinematography is flat; the plotting is simplistic. If this is the future of A.I.-generated action television, legendary franchises like Bond and Bourne have nothing to worry about when it comes to the history of entertainment. It’s so thin that one’s mind starts to wander to consideration of how Madden could get another project worthy of his charisma (which is bizarrely flattened here from his very first scene) or to how many of his lovely trips to Italy that the wonderful Stanley Tucci can pay for with his checks from this production. Hopefully, it’s a lot. [D]