The choices in Citadel: Honey Bunny sing less frequently compared to other undertakings of the Raj & DK filmmaker duo. An offshoot of Amazon Prime’s gazillion-dollar spy franchise pitted against the silliness of James Bond, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, etc., Raj & DK’s latest carries the baggage of an over-embellished universe tensely fitted into a studio-approved runtime. Like its American counterpart helmed by the Russo brothers, even the Indian version spans six episodes with a duration of 40-50 minutes each.
No one stops to smell the flowers in Citadel; every detail is synthesised in a manner for a payoff. Citadel is the kind of shiny, continuously-pruned-by-audience-testing franchise that seems to be at war with the strong authorial voice of its creator-duo: famous for their ironic, whimsical, do-it-yourself aesthetic. Having suffered through the American series, starring Priyanka Chopra and Richard Madden, I remember thinking even a ‘bad’ Raj & DK show would be an improvement for Citadel.
Honey Bunny has some of Raj & DK’s eccentricities, but I couldn’t help but feel that they were stifled by the larger universe created by Josh Applebaum, Bryan Oh and David Weil. They do an acceptable job of creating two Indian characters, who will tie into the larger world of the show, but having seen Raj & DK being unhinged (in a good way) with their choices in their original shows, no one will blame viewers for feeling slightly let-down by Citadel: Honey Bunny.
Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu) is a struggling actress in Mumbai, in the early 90s. Bunny or Rahi Gambhir (Varun Dhawan) is a Bollywood stuntman in the same era. They’re together when the show begins. As acquaintances? Lovers? Strugglers? The show doesn’t dwell on it. We’re told Rahi moonlights as a secret agent with some trusted friends (and fellow orphans) – Chacko (Shivankit Parihar), seeming like always a minute away from breaking into a TVF monologue about friendship, and Ludo (Sohum Majumdar), who I suspected as a possible traitor early on for some reason. They work for Vishwa (Kay Kay Menon, continuing his superb run after Farzi), locked in a battle with a rival organisation headed by Zuni (Simran). Their mission should they choose to accept it – is to steal a ‘disk’ from a middle-man (a reliably lecherous Parmeet Sethi).
Like its predecessor, Citadel: Honey Bunny keeps cutting between two timelines: in 1992 and 2000. There are affectionate odes to the era in the form of Rahi’s bike, which seems to be like the one Shah Rukh Khan rode in Deewana (1992) – the song Koi Na Koi Chahiye also playing in the background. Rahi sports a mullet, a haircut popularised by the likes of Shah Rukh Khan, Saif Ali Khan, Sanjay Dutt around that time. Also, Dhawan makes sense as a filmy nut, whose life revolves around posters of Bollywood heroes. I had no qualms buying him as a stuntman, because I can’t imagine a life for him outside of Bollywood.
A still from ‘Citadel: Hunny Bunny.’
It’s as a spy that Dhawan appears to be a false note. He’s got none of the understatedness, assurance in his body language to be under the radar. If anything, Varun Dhawan acts with a chip on his shoulder through most scenes here. Unlike his job description that requires him to be a cipher through most tense situations, Rahi is an open book through his tiniest grievances. He mutters, grumbles, furrows his eyebrows like he’s a sulking school kid. While Dhawan is a sincere and more-than-capable action hero, it’s his character’s overemphasis in the dramatic scenes that bothered me. On the other hand, Prabhu has the action-star wattage (on full display in Family Man S02) and just the right amount of acting chops. As Honey, Prabhu brings heft to her fights, underlining her action scenes with an urgency and desperation (like Alia Bhatt in Jigra). She’s not fighting simply because she’s good at it, but because she has no other choice.
Raj and DK arguably write the best gags in Hindi cinema, and there’s a splendid one here. Kay Kay Menon’s Vishwa calls people home and feeds them burnt chicken. It’s a clever, sadistic, psychological gag that condenses a lot about how the man runs his outfit. Another winning element of the show is young Kashvi Majmundar as Nadia, Rahi and Honey’s eight-year-old, who is every bit the wisecracking and matured-beyond-her-years kid in a Raj & DK show. One of the signature tricks that the duo pulls off here is keeping us guessing about who the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys are. They pull it off neatly, with the reveal coming at the end of episode four.
However, these are the few, scattered bright spots in a show that (even at over four hours) overstays its welcome. Despite its densely populated narrative featuring rival organisations, paranoid scientists, their clandestine meetings in art galleries, technology that could destroy the world if it falls into the wrong hands, and lots of dialogue featuring jargon like ‘coordinates’, ‘decode’, ‘collateral damage’ etc. In a Raj & DK show – I would imagine they would make fun of the jargon at some point, but here they’re forced to be sincere about it till the very end.
There are narrative holes the size of craters on Mumbai roads – where many top-class spies simply can’t get the job done. Sikandar Kher plays Shaan, one of the most incompetent spies in this world, who somehow continues to hold on to his job after major gaffes. Simran, playing Zuni, the head of a spy network – is shockingly calm as her crew keeps fumbling the ball more than once. The writers’ convenience (Sita Menon, along with Raj & DK) puts the show on cruise control towards the end, as most characters circle an important piece of tech called ‘Armada’ – which will result in one of the most comprehensive surveillance projects in the world. Despite everyone knowing who has it, and armies chasing them down, they manage to evade all of it.
Citadel: Honey Bunny is arguably the safest and weakest project Raj & DK have taken part in. Especially since their failures (Happy Ending, A Gentleman) are as storied as their successes. They try to infuse quirks here, but the rules of engagement ensure the duo are straitjacketed through most of this assignment. However, a superb unbroken take emerges out of nowhere. The camera follows a moving car and then enters through the rear window, as Honey makes her way from the boot to take down her kidnappers using a knife, with a cover of Asha Bhonsle’s Raat Baaki (from Namak Halal, 1982) playing in the background. Amidst many such green screen chase scenes, the show needed more such moments with the makers’ personality shining through, to be truly memorable.
