A particular scene from Citadel: Honey Bunny feels so essentially Raj & DK. After Bunny aka Rahi Gambhir’s (Varun Dhawan) team of agents secures a disk, they give it to their in-house techie Ludo (an uproarious Soham Majumdar) to decrypt. “It’s 8 GB,” says Ludo after Bunny asks him to speed up. This is the 90s.
“I have gotten additional computers to decode the data. 1 GB mein pata hain na kitna hota hai? (You know right how much 1 GB is) 1024 MB.” A line which would fit well for a teenager who probably just discovered Bluetooth. Nostalgia, technology and quirk, all Raj & DK elements converging into just one sequence.
It’s enjoyable to see the director duo take on a global franchise and attempt to make it their own. Honey Bunny is the Indian offshoot of the US series Citadel, starring Priyanka Chopra, Richard Madden and Stanley Tucci. I have only seen episode 1 of the mothership series (couldn’t go beyond) but can safely say that the homegrown version is miles ahead.
Honey Bunny is a prequel, an origin story of Priyanka Chopra’s slick spy Nadia Sinh but more particularly, of her parents. It’s the year 2000, little Nadia (Kashvi Majmundar) and her mother Honey (Samantha Ruth Prabhu) are laying low in Nainital. The plot kicks in once a cap and shades wearing guy starts tailing Honey in a busy market. They are soon being hunted by agents in black jackets and Canadian-Punjabi rapper style haircuts. Honey’s past catching up on her.
What’s interesting to observe in these espionage genre-staple scenes is not how Honey karate chops the “bad guys” but how Nadia, as a kid, navigates through tricky situations. Before smartphones came to be, she takes a pager to school and once it beeps “Play”, she follows the steps like a trained operative. A juvenile act of sneaking out of a classroom to escape to the theatre gets an additional layer of thrill. It’s all child’s play for her. A game of I Spy.
The narrative jumps between the past of 1992 and the present of 2000. Before being a stealthy agent, Honey was a struggling actress, kicking lascivious producers in the nuts and often unable to make ends meet. Bunny, a stuntman and her longtime friend, offers her a side gig. She has to seduce a weapons dealer and get a crucial disk. A honey trap. Although the mission gives her a bullet wound, it also imparts her with an identity. She now wants to become an agent.
Honey Bunny operates in a world of two warring spy agencies, one led by Vishwa (a gloriously cold Kay Kay Menon) and Zooni (Simran). Bunny recruits Honey in Vishwa’s team or what he calls ‘family’, while Zooni’s unit is operated by Shaan (a snaky Sikandar Kher). The lines between right and wrong keep getting muddled up and you never can pick up a side.
After a failed mission in Belgrade, which involved getting a device called ‘Armada’ from a professor, Honey parts ways with Bunny and his agency. A convenient car blast makes him assume she is dead. But years later, Bunny gets a message on a bulky cyber café desktop. “Honey is alive. You have a daughter.”
For all the maneuverings and the sneak ins, Honey Bunny proceeds achingly without context. We never really know what these spies are after. What secrets did the disk, which was secured by Honey in her maiden mission, contain? What is Armada? “A global tracking system…It would give us a world where everyone thinks alike,” explains Vishwa. So, social media algorithm? The action set-pieces are ably constructed and the combat sequences prove that Raj & DK have polished their craft enough to make a leap for a big screen actioner.
I was impressed with Samantha’s car brawl scene where she is trapped in the trunk and tears out of the backseat, Chucky style. But all this feels like a dressing because the characters and the relationships between them are not brewed enough. We skim over the backstories of Honey and Bunny, one who was a royal princess, sidelined and married off to an old man by her patriarchal father before she ran away to Bollywood, while the latter lost his parents after robbers invaded and opened fire at a wedding function. Kay Kay Menon’s Vishwa is an enigmatic manipulator, who has a penchant for offering burnt chicken lollipops to new recruits. A test of loyalty. But he often felt less mysterious and more “missing parts”.
Honey Bunny isn’t anchored, rather it feels tied down by the US original. It seems like the story has to go a certain way so that it makes sense in the larger scheme of things. As a result, certain loose ends are hurriedly and clumsily tied up. It often tries to subvert spy film tropes and there are enough Hindi film references to bring a smile on Vasan Bala’s face, but everything soon starts feeling gimmicky. Raj & DK’s trademark, bickering humour also feels sparse. Honey Bunny dangles somewhere between a self-serious espionage drama and an ironic spy-comedy. It wants to be an individual product which also has to toe the factory line. Nobody wins.
Series: Citadel: Honey Bunny
Director: Raj & DK
Starring: Varun Dhawan, Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Kay Kay Menon, Soham Majumdar, Sikandar Kher, Saqib Saleem, Simran
Streamer: Prime Video
Rating : 3/5