Citadel: Honey Bunny series review: Varun Dhawan, Samantha’s spy show sparks intermittent joy FilmyMeet

In most spy thrillers, a hunt is always on for a MacGuffin. This is usually a piece of tech with unfathomable and potentially catastrophic powers. In the American Citadel, a trope-y, anodyne action series from last year, executive produced by the Russo brothers and starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden, this was the ‘X-Case’, its disarmingly generic name chiming with its contents: whereabouts of retired spies, plus a cache of nuclear codes.

I was expecting Raj & DK to have fun with this trope in Citadel: Honey Bunny, the Indian spin-off of Citadel (an Italian offshoot, Diana, began streaming on Prime Video last month). This is how they play it. Two scientists meet at a Belgrade museum in 1992. They are old comrades who address each other by their first names: Raghu and Pavel. Their present mission, we gather, is to safeguard the ‘Armada’—an advanced remote monitoring system—from slipping into the wrong hands. “Guard it with your life,” Pavel instructs grimly, before handing over the gizmo stuffed inside a tape of Ramesh Shippy’s Shaan (1980).

It is a silly little choice, having a paranoid European scientist matter-of-factly pass on globe-threatening technology in a shell of yesteryear Bollywood. Yet it sings. Weirdness of this kind, precisely, is what endears the Raj & DK brand in our minds. Their breakout series, The Family Man, is among the few enjoyably atypical spy shows out there. In a similar vein, Honey Bunny springs to life whenever it’s trying to invent and Indianize, like when two agents effect a traffic deadlock by yelling like North Indian hoodlums. At other points, however, the series closely resembles the boilerplate Hollywood franchise it’s been tasked to augment.

The series, a prequel, unfolds in two timelines. Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu) is a struggling actress in 90’s Bombay, auditioning for bit roles like ‘heroine’s friend’ and ‘village girl’. Failing to make ends meet, she’s thrown a lifeline by stuntman Bunny (Varun Dhawan), who enlists her as a decoy in a spy op. Bunny, it turns out, is a footsoldier of Vishwa (Kay Kay Menon), the head of a clandestine spy network. After she’s injured in the course of her mission and her cover is blown, Honey is offered an out. But she decides to enlist, finding a purpose in the mercenary life that her travails in moviedom denied.

Eight years on, Honey and Bunny are leading quiet, separate lives. Unbeknownst to Bunny, they have a young daughter, Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar) — precocious, pert, a tactical thinker, halfway the ass-kicking superspy she’s destined to become. The present narrative turns on Honey and Nadia fending off armed agents while Bunny, acting on a tip-off, makes haste to find his lost family. As in all spy dramas, he reassembles the old gang: bespectacled techie Ludo (a charming Soham Majumdar), and old-school weapons man Chako (Shivankit Singh Parihar), now a sad sack corporate employee with two kids.

Buttressed by a sizeable budget, and working in tandem with cinematographer Johan Heurlin Aidt, Raj & DK pile on the action in Honey Bunny. Commendably, the filmmakers appear unfazed by the pressure to match up to Hollywood, following their own, homegrown logic of mayhem. There are several ‘oners’—inside cars, hotel rooms and cavernous old palaces — but these are pitched as scrappy and scuzzy battles instead of attention-grabbing set pieces. While the action is definitely slicker than the Govinda-era films Bunny stunts for, it has a 90s heart: the level-based gunplay, for instance, is closer to films like Aatish and Baazi than the thudding monotone of Singham Again.

The writing in Honey Bunny is less persuasive than the action. The spy-talk sounds leaden and rote: “Activate all mobile units!”; “I’ll get command to prep the troops, ASAP!” Bunny’s manipulation at the hands of Vishwa makes for an interesting track (“This is a necessary sacrifice”, the greying spymaster tells him. Only Kay Kay Menon can get away with this stuff). Meanwhile, Honey, who speaks in a mix of English and Telugu-accented Hindi, and is played by a Southern star, is a real problem for dialogue writer Sumit Arora to solve. His answer is to cheekily concede defeat. “Did you write your own speech?” Honey is asked at one point. “That’s why it is in English,” she demures.

This is Dhawan’s streaming debut; Ruth Prabhu earlier played the antagonist — a Sri Lankan militant — in the second season of The Family Man. The actors, who are the same age, make sharp, convincing action stars. But their characters are vaguely defined, and, over six episodes, I could not latch on to either. They are simple, fairy-tale constructs — ”I have a daughter….and she’s in danger,” Bunny announces early on—and the interplay of betrayals and reconciliations over the two timelines don’t land with clarity and force. Given Nadia’s presence, a sense of pre-destiny hangs over the story; whatever happens to her parents, we know, the little girl who can survive on mango slurpees will make it out safe.

Honey Bunny fires a few blanks, but don’t blame the weapons department.

Citadel: Honey Bunny is streaming on Prime Video