Toxic A Fairy Tale For Grown Ups movie story: Orphaned siblings Ganga (Nayanthara) and Raya (Yash) build a criminal empire on the back of ruthless violence in the Goa of the 40s and 50s.
Toxic A Fairy Tale For Grown Ups movie review: Toxic was a film that Yash had initially said would be small, but good. Then, things changed; it grew in scale and he remarked that Geetu Mohandas came to him with a “small idea” and that he made it what it is now. Initially, Yash fans were far from thrilled about his collaboration with Geetu because of her earlier filmography. The Kannada star’s involvement as a producer, actor, and, eventually, writer, gave them hope of a rocking good time in theatres. Alas, that, it appears, is the film’s biggest undoing.
Kiara Advani and Yash in Toxic
The writing credit is exactly what worried me; sparks of Yash’s literary genius were on display in the dialogues of KGF, after all. Then, as promotional material began dropping, the question that lingered was – just how much of Geetu’s script was still in the reckoning in the final product? In the 3 hours and 15 minutes run-time, my best bet is that her ideas account for a minor portion of the second half. Ideally, this should have been the film’s saving grace, but there was just so much mindless mayhem in the run-up to it that it all goes down the drain.
It's been in the works for a while, but with KGF, Yash painted himself into a corner – the all-swag larger-than-life hero with grey shades, who spews (hilarious and bordering on cringe) punchlines; all of which appealed to his core audience. It’s an image that is as firmly stuck as his beard – it’s not going away. And Toxic only builds on that. The entire first half of the film is a rather pointless collection of shots of Yash aura farming (there’s BGM about said aura to boot), delivering supposedly killer dialogues at 0.5 playback speed, peppered with random action blocks. It’s so bad that it is funny!
Worse still, he does it twice over, as Raya and Ticket, with absolutely no character building and, hence, no emotional connect. For someone who’s forever reminded of his sister Ganga’s sacrifices to care for and nurture him, Raya has little to no regard for the other women in his life.
The second half is when things get remotely interesting, but by then, you are so disillusioned, you just want it to end. What makes the whole experience annoyingly irritating is that there’s literally nothing to redeem it. Ravi Basrur’s music is most jarring, perhaps in tune with the visuals that often felt like they were straight out of a video game. The women of Toxic – all 5 of them – have precious little to offer. Some will chalk up Toxic as career-worst performances.
For all the money that’s been spent on the making of Toxic, (an unverified Rs 400 cr budget), what’s also unpardonable is that there are literally no wow moments or emotional hooks. Even the much-talked about adult content has no steam to it.
Toxic A Fairy Tale For Grown Ups verdict: The soundtrack of the title reveal of Toxic was about chaos being a man that we’d want. There’s chaos for sure; just not what we want.
PS: How, just how, is this an international quality film?
