‘Citadel: Honey Bunny’ Review: Will The Real Raj & DK Please Stand Up?

Directors: Raj & DK
Writers: Sita R. Menon, Raj & DK, Sumit Arora
Cast: Varun Dhawan, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Kashvi Majmundar, Kay Kay Menon, Saqib Saleem, Sikandar Kher, Soham Majumdar, Shivankit Singh Parihar, Simran Bagga
Streaming on: Amazon Prime Video
Language: Hindi

Citadel: Honey Bunny is a catchy title. In fact, you can almost hear it. “Honey Bunny” instantly evokes the viral Idea Cellular ad jingle from 2012: you’re my pumpkin pumpkin/hello honey bunny. But there’s more to the earworm than a Pulp Fiction tribute or a term of endearment. The commercial itself showed a traveler infecting different parts of the country with a tune; the cutesy lyrics, too, felt like the collective sound of couples staying connected across regions. It’s not a stretch to suggest that Citadel: Honey Bunny — whose pan-world premise features a pan-Indian adventure of a couple named Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu) and Bunny (Varun Dhawan) — is a long-form descendent of the jingle. It’s totally on brand for director duo Raj & DK, who thrive on affectionate pop-cultural nods, cinephilia and retro references.

Much like Guns & Gulaabs (2023), their six-episode thriller unfolds in the 1990s, offering them plenty of scope to texturise a globe-trotting narrative. It’s full of narrative colour and detail across two separate timelines (1992 and 2000). Bunny is a Bollywood stuntman who moonlights as a spy; Honey is a struggling actress who joins his team. Honey’s daughter in 2000, Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar), is named after Australian-Indian stuntwoman and star Fearless Nadia; the poster of her cult film, Diamond Queen (1940), appears more than once. Honey’s younger version looks like early Shilpa Shetty, complete with hair ribbons, denims and a nasal voice. A VHS tape of Gair Kanooni (1989) becomes a bonding device; playful scenes (including a first kiss and a first family moment) revolve around Honey and Bunny’s split-second glimpses as backup dancer and stunt-biker in the film. A blood-drenched Cassata ice-cream slab shapes Bunny’s childhood trauma. A top-secret exchange happens between chat handles called Albert Pinto and Break Dancer. Bunny and his colleagues use cinema-coded nicknames like Predator and Terminator.

The cassette cover of Ramesh Sippy’s Shaan (1980) plays a key role, thematically and otherwise. Flashbacks and character arcs contain vintage Hindi film tropes like wedding shootouts, orphanages, manipulative mentors and illegitimate royals. The film-makers often use nostalgia to ground their stories. As a result, most of the action set pieces — including their template of two complex one-take sequences — don’t look prohibitive; the viewer doesn’t feel excluded from the slickness of the violence. The needle drops feed into the relatability, ranging from Deewana’s ‘Koi Na Koi Chahiye’ (during a heist plan), Satya’s ‘Sapno Mein Milti Hai’ (during an abduction), a ‘Raat Baaki’ remix (during the escape from said abduction) to Alisha Chinai’s indi-pop track Aah Alisha (on a kid’s walkman while her mom kicks butt) and Baazigar’s ‘Ye Kaali Kaali Aankhen’ (at a dhaba).

The characters, too, are influenced by the trends of the time. Despite the espionage excesses, they don’t exist in isolation of the world around them. For instance, little Nadia sounds like she’s seen the smart-alecky daughter from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998); she even carries a bag with a mandolin poking out of it, a la Raj from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). The self-referencing isn’t out of place either: Farzi’s Bhuvan Arora appears as a frustrated ‘side actor’ named Bhuvan, while Shivankit Singh Parihar’s Chako — Bunny’s teammate and buddy — has a Family Man-style arc that riffs on the actor’s TVF stardom (“IIT is getting competitive,” he tells Bunny, while tutoring his son on a payphone).

The problem with Citadel: Honey Bunny, however, is the first part of its title. If the lore of Honey Bunny represents the Raj & DK touch, it’s the legacy of Citadel that becomes the billionaire villain. This series is the Indian spin-off that expands the universe of Citadel, a big-budget and defiantly mediocre Hollywood series produced by the Russo brothers, Marvel’s director-in-chiefs. Honey Bunny is born with the unfortunate privilege of having to precede the events of Citadel. It’s implied that Nadia is the origin of Nadia Sinh, the top agent played by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, which means that Varun Dhawan and Samantha are playing Chopra’s parents. Evidently, Honey Bunny is weighed down by the looming corporate shadow of a franchise. It’s like watching a contest of identities rather than a confluence of cultures; the homegrown treatment is foiled by the flimsy mythology of the material it emerges from. In this case, it’s worse if nobody wins the contest.

It begins with the micro-transgressions. One doesn’t associate exposition-dump dialogue with Raj & DK titles, but the pressure of being a Citadel prequel shows. There’s a sense that not enough of us might understand the context, so a few off-screen lines seem to have been lazily inserted in post production (in a way that conceals off-sync lips and voices). When Bunny reunites with Chako at the orphanage after years, he sounds like he’s literally narrating his situation to us: “Yes, Honey is alive and I have a daughter named Nadia”. Their banter is often plagued with these symptoms of B-movie writing. In cricketing terms, it commits the cardinal sin of batting without intent on a treacherous pitch. A glaring example is an exchange between a rogue agent and his former colleague towards the end; a weirdly elaborate line like “you not only killed my husband, the head of Citadel, you started your own agency!” is yelled twice. A lot of the dialogue has an episode-recap ring to them. At another point, two scientists (one of them is modeled after the nuclear scientist of The Dark Knight Rises) meet at a museum and speak to each other in quotes and first names.

In contrast, Honey’s stilted communication — a broken tablespoon of Hindi, a dash of Telugu, a pinch of English — works because it reflects her failed acting aspirations; even her impassioned monologues sound like auditions. Samantha is a viscerally committed action star, and as in The Family Man 2, she does a good job of speaking in body language and emoting through motion. Some of her combat scenes are so guttural that they overshadow the inner machinations of Honey. Dhawan is similarly at ease in the kinetic sequences, and also as a man-child agent who’s in thrall of his patriarchal leader, but the screenplay saddles his character with easy transformations and vanilla thoughts. He’s technically a henchman who’s learning to grow a mind of his own, but Rahi “Bunny” Gambhir seems to be in quest of an aura that distinguishes grey characters.

Ironically, despite the explanatory tone, the important questions remain lost in adaptation: what really is Citadel? What does the rival agency do? What happened in the 8-year gap? What’s happening? Technical terms like Project Talwar, a priceless tracking technology called Armada and its role in the Yugoslav War are thrown in to chisel the vagueness, almost as if the stakes are being made up to justify a wide-ranging spy saga. There’s a to-be-continued vibe about the loyalties and backstories, particularly because a huge chunk of the drama unfolds in Belgrade, where two Indian agencies run riot in the Balkan nation for a device that “should not fall into the wrong hands”. MI6 could never.

Another thing that’s uncharacteristically jarring in the series is Nadia’s character. It’s always tricky with precocious children written by adults — especially those who address their parents ‘as equals’ — and the series scrambles hard to account for this stereotype. It presents Nadia as a kid who needs to be wise and alert beyond her years, someone who’s trained in the art of self-preservation and semi-attachment. She can’t afford to be normal. But there’s a difference between sounding older and sounding mature, between growing fast and growing up smart. Nadia errs on the side of Bollywood girlhood, almost as if she is designed to know that an Indian crossover star plays her in the future.

That said, the show is fundamentally sounder than Citadel. A large part of this is down to its choice of setting. Basing it in the 1990s changes the identity of technology in a genre whose suspense is often undone by futuristic gadgets. The word “gigabyte” is uttered in awe. “Hacking” is still novel; pagers, electronic maps and tracking pins are still cutting-edge. Chases are messier, connections are lost and reunions hit differently. There are no digital footprints, only physical intuition. Pretending to be dead and disappearing is still plausible. A man has to predict where his enemy might be next; urgent phone calls have a premium on them. Unlike Citadel, there are no goofy memory-wiping subplots; instead, there’s old-fashioned gaslighting and psychological manipulation by toxic father figures. It’s more in tune with the South Asian landscape, where reverence and respect continue to be potent weapons of mental destruction.

Kay Kay Menon plays a bitter former spy named Vishwa, who recruits orphans like Bunny and exploits their emotional hunger (a devious burnt-chicken test literalises this hunger). What he stands for is unclear, but it’s more or less a take on ideological and religious radicalisation. I also like that the directors and production designer Meenal Agarwal don’t take the easy way out. The 1990s can be an awkward decade to ‘recreate’: not distant enough to be a flashy historical piece and not close enough to be careless about history. The series could’ve staged the action in a way that conceals the backgrounds, but even the minor set pieces feature post-liberalisation vehicles like Tata Sumos, Maruti Esteems, Kinetic Hondas and Ambassadors. This hides the advancements of modern film-making behind a small screen. As in their previous shows, the personality and substance of the action outwits its style. The electro-synth score adds soul to a journey that goes beyond its status as a sepia-tinged backstory of a ‘franchise lead’.

Stripped of its expensive genre ornaments and Ramayana metaphors, what’s left of the premise is simple: love as an expression of morality. The cross-cutting between the two periods — again, a Citadel formula — gets exhausting, but the cause-and-effect structure works better as a relationship drama. In 1992, we see a Tamasha-coded conflict of sorts: Honey becomes the heart to Bunny’s head, and their companionship urges him to rethink who he truly is. Across Bombay and Belgrade, Honey’s conscience pokes holes in his brainwashing: good or bad? Terrorist or rebel? The rest is white noise. Simultaneously, in 2000, we see the aftermath: a reformed man looks for his hardened ex-lover and a child he’s never met. The mother-daughter duo are on the run from Vishwa’s new “son”, the Terminator-like KD (a standout Saqib Saleem), a killing machine striving to be the family superstar that Bunny was. The two timelines flirt, and though the linking is choppy, there’s something poignant about how the series, too, is on the run from its past. The baggage takes its toll: the neutralized swag, the bloody umbilical cord and the lack of everyday humour (only Sikander Kher cusses with sur).

Every now and then, the Western clouds dissipate to let some ethnic sunshine peek through. Two wounded rivals — like estranged brothers from a Seventies’ potboiler — lament the legacy of their creator. A prodigal princess threatens to smother her paralysed father and cracks up at his fear. A honey trapper is taken by the paternal softness of her next target. An assassin mumbles “oversmart ch*tiya” after murdering a civilian who catches his lie. A meet-cute revolves around a stunt performer teaching an actress how to die more authentically. A kid’s favourite codeword is “Play” and it denotes the opposite of playing. The spirit is all there, but it’s stuck in a conformist body. Given the show’s inherent battle with its name, perhaps it’s time to paraphrase a line from The Social Network (2010): “Drop the ‘Citadel’. Just ‘Honey Bunny’. It’s cleaner.” It’s the kind of reference that would’ve killed in a Raj & DK original.