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Citadel: Diana is the spin-off from last year’s over-expensive and under-delivering Citadel, opening with a scene where our heroine, played by Matilda De Angelis (The Undoing), kills someone off-camera and fakes being shot at, by aiming at herself in the arm, to make it look like self-defence.
Despite having a bizarre, lop-sided haircut, she has a built-in Terminator-style facility for eye-tracking of anything pertinent, such as a target, so this Miss will never miss.
Set in Milan, 2030, she’s one of the Manticore agents, tasked with taking out other fellow agents. Meanwhile, Edo Zani (Lorenzo Cervasio) and his father, Ettore (Maurizio Lombardi – Ripley), are checking over weapons that can transform into basic objects that’d even pass security at Co-op Live!
Then it goes back to 13 years earlier, and 9 years at another point in the programme, along with other timeframes, to highlight a tragedy in the past for Diana and her sister, Sara (Giordana Faggiano), but back in present day, Diana and work partner Luca (Marouane Zotti – I May Destroy You) are out going shooty-shooty at bad guys, near a restaurant where they couldn’t hit a person at 50 paces, yet can take out many a champagne flute!
Just as drones film Diana driving at speed from many odd angels, Citadel: Diana, itself, is also very flash, but after watching just the opening episode, it’s monumentally tedious. I sat through the whole of the original series, trying to figure out what caused the $300m price-tag, realising it clearly wasn’t a script, and while I don’t yet know the budget for this, it one looks like it’s heading the same way in the writing dept.
With the dialogue recorded in Italian, the programme defaults to dubbed English, which is fine for me. This isn’t exactly Cinema Paradiso.
Finally, before too long, you’ll find out where the opening scene fits into things, and there’s more shooty-shooty, with some double-crossing and mild fisticuffs. However, of the aforementioned ewapons, when Ettore says “There’s nothing new about that”, I was feeling the same about this programme. Shortly after release, though, I see that it’s not been received brilliantly, but it has some good action scenes in places, so I’ll skip through and check those out.
For some reason, the review screener didn’t come through, so I watched it when it went live.
Citadel: Diana is on Prime Video from today. All episodes are available from day one.
Cert: 
Running time: 45 minutes per episode (6 episodes)
Release date: October 9th 2024 (11pm)
Studio: Prime Video
Format: 2.39:1
Directors: Arnaldo Catinari
Producer: Alessandra Maman
Writers: Carlo Cosio, Alessandro Fabbri, Ilaria Bernardini, Gianluca Bernardini, Laura Colella, Giordana Mari
Music: Mokadelic , Alberto Broccatelli, Cristian Marras, Maurizio Mazzenga, Alessio Mecozzi, Luca Novelli
Cast:
Diana Cavalieri: Matilda De Angelis
Edo Zani: Lorenzo Cervasio
Ettore Zani: Maurizio Lombardi
Luca: Marouane Zotti
Cécile Martin: Julia Piaton
Julia Zani: Thekla Reuten
Matteo: Daniele Paoloni
Gabriele: Filippo Nigro
Giada: Jun Ichikawa
Sara: Giordana Faggiano
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.