Citadel: Honey Bunny Review – The Series Miss the Bull’s Eye by Miles
New Delhi:
It hits the ground running properly but the mission to maintain speed is an abject failure. what a lot Castle: Honey Bunny The effort proves too much for a script that, even at its best, can only laboriously inch its way forward — and backward. Castle: Honey Bunny An Indian spinoff of Amazon Prime Video’s Citadel Spiers, which spawned an espionage thriller series last year with Priyanka Chopra and executive produced by Richard Madden and the Russo brothers. While it has its share of action, it runs low on intrigue and suspense.
The series doesn’t exactly catch fire but it doesn’t hold our breath as its action set pieces explode on screen. Try it hard. Effort shows and experience goodness.
The Russo brothers are back on board, this time alongside another successful filmmaking duo – executive producers and directors Raj and DK – but the fare they’ve produced with Varun Dhawan and Samantha playing the titular agents makes the genre heavy weather.
The series takes place in two timelines – 1992 and 2000 In the previous episode, it has a sequence where Bollywood stuntman Bunny claims that the way actors die in Hindi films is fake and proceeds to show Honey how death happens in real life when a man is shot.
Various ways of disposing of the dead that Bani mocks are spread throughout the Citadel: Honey Bani alternates between India (Bombay/Mumbai and Nainital) and Belgrade. None of them look real or spectacular.
In action movies and web shows, when the heroes shoot, they hit the target. It rarely happens when their opponents fire back. The latter always manages to miss the mark. Things are no different in Citadel: Honey Bunny.
No matter how many times Honey – she seems more vulnerable than Bunny to being in the firing line – is injured, she quickly gets back on her feet. The vitality that Samantha lends to the character doesn’t find its way into the series as a whole.
Varun Dhawan’s boyish demeanor undermines the armor of invincibility that Bunny is supposed to sport in the toughest of situations. The character has no layers and certainly not the actor’s fault.
Working with regular collaborators Sita Menon (Shore Shore, Go Goa Gale, Farji) and Sumit Arora (The Family Man, Guns and Gulabs)Raj & DK seeks to create a global context for this Indian foray into the detective universe struggling to find a steady docking space in the genre constellation that also includes an Italian journey, Citadel: Diana.
The action scenes the directors have mounted in Belgrade, including a thrilling chase sequence through the city streets, have their moments. They are sadly 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 about creating a better, more peaceful world and controlling the levers of global power. It is as clichéd as they come with the main struggle to ensure that the key to world domination does not fall into the wrong hands.
There is a clash between an underground agency that Bunny works for when he’s not doing stunts for movie stars and a stoic, smartly saje-juni (Simran) led by Citadel’s agents.
The six-episode series seems desperate for an emotional core, using its quieter moments to explore family and friendship, love and loyalty, betrayal and moral dilemmas. These parts of the series are always drowned out by the dean generated by Honey and Bunny’s struggle to survive in a slippery world where one false move can lead to death.
“I’m always alive. I’m a monologue,” reveals Honey when she doubts her ability to make it as a spy. Her miserliness stems from the fact that she, an aspiring film actress, reduced to playing parts, not only needs a purpose in life but is also predisposed to protect her precociously-difficult school-going daughter Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar). .
Not that the little girl needed any hand holding. Nadia is destined for bigger things, which Priyanka Chopra gave a great glimpse of in 2023’s Citadel. The series tells the pre-origin story of Agent Nadia Singh, who at one point reveals that her father is Rahi Gambhir. That’s Bunny’s name.
In 1992, Bani, who has lived a life of tragedy and finds the “father” figure in seasoned secret agent Guru (KK Menon) after years in an orphanage, offers the struggling Honey a one-time job. It’s fraught with danger but the girl, fleeing an unhappy life in a South Indian palace, has no choice but to jump right in.
That leap is a one-way street. As he travels that route, he ends up in Belgrade in search of a scientist Raghu Rao (Thalaivasal Vijay), who is believed to be a key player in a global surveillance program called Project Talwar. Secrets are revealed during encounters but things don’t end as intended.
Eight years later, Honey and Bunny’s paths cross again. At this point, the war they wage becomes primarily personal. Both Nadia and her mother are on the run and Booni must find them before Juni’s hitman Shaan (Sikander Kher) and Guru’s loose cannon Kedar (Salim Saqib) corner them.
They are never out of the forest as they look for hiding places. Madhu and Nadia are on the radar of ‘bad men’, a term Ma uses to tell Nadia that it’s time to switch to ‘play’ mode. This is the only way to stay out of harm’s way. The action eventually leads to Honey and Bunny teaming up again to save Nadia from the dangers she faces.
In both timelines, Bunny works with tech geek Ludo (Soham Majumdar) and Chacko (Shivankit Parihar), a fearless hunk who has become a family man in the interim, by his side. The trio venture into battle all guns blazing.
Honey and Bunny’s past goes beyond 1992 and the series manages to give viewers a bit more of what they endured as children. Both want to erase memories of the hardships they had to deal with growing up lonely and unhappy.
Their backstories are devoted to brief flashbacks that serve to explain the mindsets they brought to adolescence, while the series focuses on the spunky little girl who must protect them from rival agents at all costs.
Citadel: Honey Bunny has two sides. Centered on the conventions of a spy thriller, which Raj and DK so expertly turned on their heads in The Family Man.
The other evokes the retro Bollywood potboiler spirit that the duo once celebrated and illuminated in Guns and Gulabs. In the former calculation, they take no risk. Later they lag behind.
Aiming at moving targets is never a good idea. It’s hardly surprising that Citadel: Honey Bunny is a misfire. It misses the bull’s eye by miles.
