'Citadel' crumbles under the weight of its own cast

It's somewhere around the fourth episode of 'Citadel' that something clicks into place and you're immediately freed from trying to understand any of it.

It's not that the show is complex. Far from it. It's like someone took the scripts of all three 'Bourne' movies, Christopher Nolan's non-Batman movies like 'Inception' and 'Tenet', and maybe a couple of other splashy blockbusters, and threw them in a blender. The words are all there, and the action sequences are there, but it's all chopped and rearranged to look like something else. Instead, what you're left with is chunks of garbage that has the shape and consistency of something resembling a very expensive TV show.

No, the reason you're freed from 'Citadel' is because you begin to understand that the cast of actors assembled has all but given up on trying to make anything out of this. Everyone is simply filing out in front of the camera, saying their lines in the intonation and with the required emphasis, and then they're packing up their bags and heading home to collect their cheques. Stanley Tucci's probably going to go home and make himself a decent Negroni and some good spaghetti. Lesley Manville, maybe she'll get her kitchen fixed or possibly redecorated. Maybe Richard Madden will book a nice holiday for himself. Priyanka Chopra Jones bought that watch she'd been eyeing up for ages.

Let's go through the plot, just for the sake of it. Mason Kane and Nadia Sinh - that's Richard Madden and Priyanka Chopra - are two secret agents working for a worldwide global spy agency, as you do, called Citadel. The agency is destroyed by a worldwide global crime syndicate called Manticore, which results in Mason and Nadia being separated and having their memories wiped. Why? The guy in the van with the headphones is Bernard Orlick, played with the enthusiasm of a dentist appointment by Stanley Tucci. Lesley Manville, to her credit, is having a ball just hamming it up as Manticore's terrifically named leader, Dahlia Archer.

The action setpieces seem lazy and repetitive. The music just blares over everything. The dialogue is 90% trailerspeak, and the few comedic riffs fail to take into account how crap the show is itself. Really, 'Citadel' just reinforces the fact that the Russo Brothers - who are executive producers on this whole shindig - somehow managed to fall ass backwards into 'Avengers: Endgame' and 'Avengers: Infinity War' being the box office juggernauts they once were. As if that weren't enough, a number of episodes are directed by cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, whose previous directing credits were twenty-odd years ago for 'House'.

'Citadel' is barely a show, and the whole thing serves as nothing more than a stark reminder of the lack of accountability in the age of streaming. How are the showrunners getting away with this? The show is a complete waste of time and money. It looks and feels expensive, the cast assembled is talented and experienced, and no doubt the crew behind the scenes are up to snuff. Yet, the script and the concept are so fundamentally weak and derivative that you'd think an AI took a stab at some of it. It's not like all of this talent - minus the writers/showrunners David Weil, Josh Appelbaum and Bryan Oh - couldn't produce something worth watching. Instead, 'Citadel' is going to clog up your feed and barrage you with advertising for the next few weeks.

Ignore it. Watch literally anything else.