'Citadel' review: Makes you want to cry (Man From) UNCLE

'In case you're wondering, it's not just my gun that's out of focus... but virtually the whole series.' Photos: Handout

Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall, says the Book of Proverbs.

The first 10 minutes of Citadel, the new and reportedly very expensive spy thriller executive-produced by the Russo Brothers, bear this out. But not in a way that's good for the show.

An apparently hapless target of the titular agency asks its superagent Nadia Sinh (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) if she is CIA or MI6.

"Do I look like a woman who plays for the minor leagues?" she asks rather, well, haughtily.

The tables are then turned not only on her and fellow agent/lover Mason Kane (Richard Madden), but on the entire agency – thanks to the elaborate scheme of rival spy network Manticore and, of course, that great old espionage thriller trope The Mole.

'I asked you if you wanted to watch 'Bullet Train', NOT bring bullets on the goshdarned train!'

So (not a spoiler but the setup of the series), the globe-spanning Citadel essentially gets destroyed. Really? An agency that considers itself "major league" has such a shallow structure that one grandiose Michael Corleone-style orchestration can take it out?

And they really should fire whoever was responsible for surveillance, intelligence, and assorted chatter-gathering off whatever networks spy agencies use – not that it matters, since they're almost all dead before the 15-minute mark anyway.

Come on – the venerable (and durable) Counter-Terrorism Unit of 24 could recover from mole strikes and enemy attacks within a couple of hours, show time.

Also, the "minor-league" agencies are often portrayed as so meticulous/paranoid that they zealously protect their core structure against any attack, be it a strategic assassination or a bomb in a Congressman's car going off at Langley.

'Why Granny, what shiny silverware you have.'... 'All the better to bribe Citadel agents with, my dear.'

But enough of the show's hugely unconvincing setup. The result of it is that Nadia vanishes, while Mason makes like Madden's adopted brother from that other show and suddenly knows nothing (of his past).

Their handler Bernard (Stanley Tucci) survives and decides (eight years later) he has to stop Manticore from getting its hands on a MacGuffin that will definitely spell the utter end of Citadel.

The plotting and scripting here really rankled, and this is from someone who liked The Last Jedi (nimbly avoids shower of eggs).

There's more, not just the conceit of positioning Citadel as some super-elite agency that gets effortlessly dismantled by a grandmotherly type (Lesley Manville) – like the Big Bad Wolf pretending to be Granny.

No one seems to have a plan, not Orlick, not even the bad guys (aside from the largely off-camera destruction of their enemy).

"Let's break in and steal the MacGuffin," says Orlick, without any proper escape plan that leads to the hugely clumsy capture of a principal character.

Even a flashback to when Citadel was supposedly at peak capacity is more blunder than thunder, with Mason's fat being pulled out of the fire during a The Spy Who Loved Me/Inception hybrid action sequence by pure luck and god-out-of-the-machine happenstance.

While some action scenes are slick and brutal, everything in between seems thoughtlessly cobbled together or borrowed from better sources simply to link one fight or chase to another.

This is not an auspicious start for what aims to be an international franchise, with spin-off/satellite series planned for India and Italy, among others.

At least there are a couple of twisty developments late in the third episode (of six) that, among others, address Mason's hugely convenient situation after Citadel's fall. Will events from here on undo all the damage done by the first half of this season? I'm not convinced.

If anything, Citadel is proof that you don't need a writer's strike to ruin a show – indifference in the creative process and making cynical presumptions of your audience will do it every time.

Oh, for the days of better-crafted (and way more fun) spy shows like Man From UNCLE... and Get Smart. Over a half century after those gems, we haven't made much progress, evidently.

New episodes of Citadel Season One arrive on Prime Video every Friday.