Uh.

For real though, where to begin. Indian cinema is one that features almost exclusively supermen, by which I mean in the classic DC Superman mould: invincible heroes for whom it is almost hard to find a genuine threat for. The best films, of course, layer the threat on via more than just the potential of bodily harm to the hero–and to be honest, in the very best ones the heroes can still get hurt–but the worst are those that reward the viewer with little thrill or tension and instead only endless aura-farming.

I mean, you can already tell which Toxic is. Toxic, if anything, put me in mind of a Steven Segal movie. You know how in a Steven Segal movie he doesn’t even ever get hit? Sure, there are funny examples of this–I cry laughing at some of the ADR in On Deadly Ground–but there’s usually only so much naked ego you can take.

Rockstar Yash makes Steven Segal look like the humblest man on earth. No, I understand how impossible that sentence sounds. The ego on display here is so completely out of proportion it’s genuinely confusing. Yash plays Raya, an abandoned street kid who becomes India’s most unstoppable gangster as the coolest man that has ever existed, introduced by, and this is not a joke, fucking a woman so well that it blows up a graveyard. When he leaps out and starts to kill dudes, he literally does things like rip their arms off almost without noticing. He’s just. that. powerful.

The reason this is confusing is because Toxic is clearly meant to be Yash’s Scarface. If KGF 2 was his Godfather: Part II taken to 11, this doesn’t so much take Scarface to some absurd number but create a buffer overflow that breaks the calculator. Like Tony Montana, Raya is supposed to ultimately be a tragic figure, someone who destroys not only himself in his ruthless ambition but everyone around him. But he also has to seem like the coolest dude in the world at all times… and he also has to be ruthless and a badass.

This, obviously, does not work. But it does not work on such a heightened level that it’s beyond any cognitive dissonance I’ve experienced before even in Indian cinema (and I’ve watched some absolute nonsense like Indian 2.) I mean, this film literally opens with the woman he supposedly loves blowing herself up in terror with a grenade so he won’t see her. Then he takes the child they had together and throws him off a cliff!¹

So that we’re supposed to later invest in his love story with said woman seems… insane? Also, and I have to stress this, during said love story, he, out of nowhere, with no connection to basically anything else in the film, fights a gang of nuns who reveal themselves to be dominatrices (almost exactly like that famously controversial Hitman Absolution trailer) and kills them even more violently than Agent 47 (in fact implying fellatio with his gun as he blows one of their heads off.)

And this was, ostensibly, directed by a woman!²

Oh, and he kills like a hundred clowns at one point.

As with a lot of Indian films, when I mention all the insane stuff that happens, you might think “ha, sounds amazing!” but I have never felt more sick in a theatre than when my buddy Justin Decloux leaned over and said to me “this is three hours and twelve minutes long.” Because even if this is shot in a relentlessly slick, trailer-ready fashion, almost nothing interesting or exciting happens as Raya swans about, sleeping with a couple of different women and engaging in minor gang intrigue. It’s extremely telling that the trailer that got me interested in seeing this is only the first action sequence, because once you’ve seen that, you’ve seen basically every trick this movie has.

Stunt choreographer J.J Perry pulls a lot from his work on John Wick, but it’s flat and uninspired because Wick is constantly getting hurt, which Yash will not allow! Even in the fight he loses, he technically wins it first, only losing it because he won’t kill his opponent!

And that entire fight’s a cheat, anyway, because the film, after noodling around pointlessly for over two hours descends into complete incoherence. The climax doesn’t work on any level, as flails around attempting to claw back any of the pathos that was clearly intended at the script stage (assuming it had one.)

Toxic is an absolutely demoralising time at the cinema. A pounding, miserable exercise in ego and hubris. For once, Indian reviewers–famously harsh–were absolutely justified in their vitriol.

(Not least because I suspect that at least a number of establishing shots in this are AI slop, which gave me some pause on covering it at all. I certainly didn’t know going in, but consider it yet another reason to not even think about watching this.)

1. Now, technically the film does try and make this look a bit ambiguous, the car slides off the cliff because it’s raining or whatever, but not until later! ↩︎
2. Although the production was obviously so troubled, and Yash must be so clearly impossible to work with, god knows what she actually got to do.  ↩︎