Review: The Russo brothers’ spy thriller ‘Citadel’ has plenty of action and little else

Another day, another series about spies. This one’s called “Citadel”; it premieres Friday on Prime Video, has the Marvel-connected Russo brothers as executive producers and reportedly cost a mint, built on top of another mint.

Assembled from bits and pieces of spy stories that have come before it — really, it’s almost unavoidable by this point — it is nominally different from its kin in being not just a series, but a series of series in the shape of a worldwide marketing plan, with linked shows slated to be produced in other countries.

India, Italy and Mexico are ones I’ve seen mentioned, but the implication is that if this thing flies, there’ll be a “Citadel” spinoff produced in every nation on Earth — a plan for global domination not so different from what the villains here are up to. (Or the whole MCU game plan, which itself can feel a little evil.) Given the investment, it’s no surprise that a second season is already on the books.

As a kind of preview of this internationalism, our two main characters — Richard Madden as Mason Kane and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Nadia Sinh, agents of the eponymous Citadel — banter in English, Mandarin, German and Spanish as they meet on a super-luxurious train hurtling through the Italian Alps, where no trains should hurtle in the first place. (They appear at first to be strangers, which clearly means they are not.) The talk, naturally, is prelude to what makes action films so salable around the world: the first of many fight scenes that punctuate the three episodes out for review.

It transpires that Mason and Nadia have been lured to this fancy, speedy train in order to be assassinated by Manticore, an enemy spy organization, heretofore unknown to them, which has acquired a list of Citadel operatives and is in the process of eliminating every last one. As will later be explained by surviving self-proclaimed “tech genius” Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci), who has helpful montages ready, Citadel is an independent, stateless fellowship of spies whose only loyalty is to humankind and which has “helped shape every major event for good in the last 100 years.” The equally international and unaffiliated Manticore — not to be confused with the 1970s prog-rock record label, though that is a series I’d definitely watch — is, by contrast, the creation of the world’s richest (which is to say most criminal) families, meant only to increase their wealth and power by shaping major events for bad.

Stanley Tucci plays Bernard Orlick, a self-proclaimed tech genius.

(Paul Abell / Prime Video)

And so ensues much punching and grunting and kicking and gouging and shooting, and shooting, and shooting. A brutal tussle in the close quarters of a rail-car bathroom recalls, I would guess intentionally, a similar pas de deux between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in “From Russia With Love” — but it’s a long way from that Bond film, whose climactic scene involved Connery being chased around some low hills by a helicopter, to your modern action film, whose computer-assisted stunts defy physics and physiology. It’s the Wile E. Coyote School of Filmmaking, where nothing is impossible and nearly anything might be survived.

What is survived here, to begin with — by Mason and Nadia, who will lose sight of each other until we jump forward eight years — is a fiery train derailment, from a great height, into a lake. Mason will wake up in a hospital with no memory of who he is or how he got there — a subsequent Jason Bourne reference demonstrates that series creator David Weil (“Hunters,” “Invasion”) knows as well as you that this is not history’s first amnesiac secret agent.

In those elided eight years, Mason has established a blueberry-pancake normal life in Oregon with a wife (Ashleigh Cummings) and young daughter (Caoilinn Springall) — though old memories lately have been flashing into consciousness. One day, the family is kidnapped and spirited away to a remote Wyoming mountaintop, where Bernard will tell him who he is and, as possibly the only other Citadel agent left alive, what he needs him to do.

The MacGuffin at the heart of these opening episodes is a case that contains all of Citadel’s many secrets, secrets “that can murder millions of people or hold entire nations hostage,” including the launch codes “to every nuclear weapon in the world.”

Now, I’m prompted to change my work password every 90 days, so I’m going to suppose that nuclear codes would be changed at least once in eight years. (Of course, that is the just the kind of oversight you learn about too late.) It also holds a collection of syringes, each of which contains an agent’s uploaded memories. You do not want to think about this any longer than the people who wrote it down.

Mason (Richard Madden) loses his memory after surviving a fiery train derailment and pursues an everyday life.

(Jonathan Prime / Prime Video)

One assumes that the twists and the turns of the plot have been carefully laid out on a whiteboard somewhere, which doesn’t mean that “Citadel” isn’t nonsensical — semi-sensical, anyway. (It does occasionally wink in its own direction: “We are two guys in a van with a briefcase, Bernard,” Mason will say. “We’re the plot of ‘Dumb and Dumber.’”) It’s a kind of declarative narrative in which information just falls from the sky and characters transport from place to place as needed. (The opening episodes include scenes set in Virginia, Morocco, Switzerland, New York City, Chicago, Utah, Spain, Italy and Iran — not filmed there, necessarily — and I assume this is only the tip of the itinerary.) Magical tech — which no modern thriller can do without, seemingly — is deployed willy-nilly.

At any rate, “Citadel” doesn’t let the grass grow under its feet. You can’t accuse it of being slow. Conversation is just a short bridge to the next bout of action, which tends to be brutal in the way the kids, with their video games and comic books and Quentin Tarantino movies, like it these days. (Accordingly, “Citadel” may or may not be your idea of fun.) Events are predictably unpredictable — nothing will be as it seems. “Everything you know is a lie,” says Bernard to a man who has been torturing him. Which, of course, might be a lie.

Tucci and the up-for-anything Lesley Manville as a Manticore bigwig whose day job is as Britain’s ambassador to Washington — a double life that is spelled out from nearly her first line of dialogue — bring older-gen thespian cred to the series, with more evident commitment than, say, Marlon Brando, dropping by to pick up a paycheck for “Superman.”

Madden, who was Robb Stark on “Game of Thrones,” and Chopra Jonas, a major Indian film star known here for “Quantico,” attractively fill the screen and wrap some soulfulness around their characters for at least an illusion of depth. Will any of them actually develop? (Madden, whose amnesiac nice guy is overlaid on the egotistical super spy he was, does have some interesting possibilities.) But on the evidence of only three episodes, who can say?

Then again, is depth what we require? The Daniel Craig era notwithstanding, the reason we still get new Bond movies after 60 years isn’t that the character is nuanced. Quite the opposite.