Since his headline-grabbing and hormone-flaring turn in 2018's BBC political drama The Bodyguard, Richard Madden has taken up comfortable residence near the apex of the ‘Who will be next James Bond?’ list. In the five years since, he's been passed around the top three like a game of pass the parcel, and despite occasionally losing steam to the likes of Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Tom Hardy, he's never been far from the forefront of the conversation around Daniel Craig's successor. And while it's been reiterated that auditions for the next 007 aren't even a twinkle in producers' eyes yet, that doesn't stop the public from wondering if every potential star's existing projects are a showreel of some sort. If The Bodyguard was Madden orbiting the world of super spies, then his latest project, the flashy Amazon Prime series Citadel, is a crashing landing right into their headquarters. Unfortunately, it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.
Citadel revolves around a global spy agency that is responsible for all the good things that have ever happened in the world. Untethered to any one country, the team – made up in part by Madden, Priyanka Chopra and Stanley Tucci giving his best Q – are good guys for hire. That is until the bad guys, Manticore, headed up by an icy Lesley Manville, kill every field agent except Madden and Chopra, with the pair going full amnesia, forgetting their pasts and identities.
Citadel is basically a fridge raid dinner of a spy property, taking bits from every existing franchise and throwing it together into a pot. There's Bond, naturally, in the form of Tucci's gadget wiz, hints of The Man from U.N.C.L.E with their global operation and Madden's hunky, empty shell of a secret agent ripped from the spec script of the Bourne franchise (something they even joke about).
The memory loss thing comes and goes as Madden, who's actually called Mason Kane and who is willing to leave his new wife and child pretty easily in pursuit of his past, gets re-embroiled in the world of warring super spies. In time jumps back to the good ol' days of Citadel, we see him manoeuvring flashy hidden HQs full of neon blue touch screens and bantery agents speaking in quips, gun fights in snow-covered Soviet-style concrete mountain blocks and impressively choreographed stunt scenes (one involving paragliding down a mountain on skis that looks suspiciously like the hilariously cringe surfing scene in Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan's final outing as James Bond).
All this is to say, that if there was some kind of CV that you had to submit to the Brocolli family to be considered for Bond, Madden has the previous experience section down. Unbothered response to suffering from internal bleeding? Check. Ability to bed a woman within three minutes of knowing her? Check. Vague homoeroticism with the man who makes the poison dart pens? Also check. But Citadel, for all of the transferable skills it may offer, is a crude attempt at padding out a resumé. If Bond is some kind of high-level position, then Citadel is the babysitting job you had at 15 that you say gave you ‘experience managing subordinates and delegating tasks’.
The problem with doing something as on the nose as Citadel when it comes to Bond is that it makes any faults all the more glaring. With it being such a rip of classic genre motifs, the series gives us everything we expect; the seduction scenes, the fighting scenes, the world-altering mumbo jumbo uttered over an invisible earpiece. But they're all the worst versions of what we've come to enjoy. They're hammy, overly stylised, kind of cheap looking despite being part of one of the most expensive television shows of all time and, to put it plainly, just not that interesting. We've seen it all before and better, which makes it a disservice to someone like Madden.
Madden is compelling in Citadel, slightly dodgy American accent aside (which, of course, wouldn't be an issue if he ever was to don the famous suit), and honestly, his performance isn't such a disaster that a Bond offering, even now, would feel past its zeitgeist due date. But this isn't gonna be the thing that lands him the big job at MI6.
Citadel, starring Richard Madden, is streaming on Amazon Prime Video now.
