Film: Toxic: A Fairytale For Grown UpsDirector: Geetu Mohandas Actors: Yash, Kiara Advani Rating: 1 star
Frankly, I ‘ve been feeling sick, ever since stepping outta Toxic — perhaps even since an hour into the film, desperately waiting for the interval.
And that’s not because I was looking for a loo-break — but just to give the damn brain a break, from the non-stop thud-thud, causing sar-dard, for the high-frequency cacophony of bullets and fists, sickles and sticks pounding flesh; scene after scene, deaths after deaths.
Even the background music feels similar. You feel as if you’re drowning in it, without any hope of dosing off.
This sheer stupidity, by and large, must also qualify for crude cruelty towards general human intellect — whether or not you’re a hardcore fan, with a softcore for some kinda empathy/conscience.
Usually, there is a storyline in such actioners to stitch together the said stunt set-pieces.
What if, though, an entire movie was a set-piece — starring the heavily bearded Yash, in a close-up so extreme, you could count his nostril hair, with his head tilted, while he lights a cigarette/cigar, blowing smoke across the screen, before walking straight, or sideways, from the camera, in a hat and long, leather overcoats, vanquishing armies of men, with guns and bare hands.
Repeat that sequence, perhaps, 50 times over — that’s truly the gist of Toxic. But how do you watch the same scene over, and over, again? Well, surely there are ways to render it fresh still, outside of novel methods to decapitate human bodies.
Hence, a group of stuntwomen in a circus attack the hero Yash, instead. Likewise, he takes them on, one by one (as usual). It doesn’t matter, he’s killing whom, or why. And yes, that’s essentially the story.
How else to explain this Sandalwood tentpole, set in Goa, 1947, among Salvadore, Marcus, Anthony et al for brown brothers and gora garus, with a Kannada hero for a killing machine, soaked in alcohol and blood.
There’s some talk about opium trade with China, and setting up the casino business in Macau — to what import and significance is this to the supposed script defies casual comprehension.
Often, the villain sets the context for a hero. The hero here seems the villain himself. His motivations appear pretty much unknown; besides, that he grew up as an orphan.
And, as he puts it, “Mother language is violence — universal language!” So is sex, for his constant carnal desires.
Apart from acting over every minute of this movie, young Yash, labelled as ‘Rocking Star’ in the opening credit, has also written and produced Toxic. Which makes sense, given that Yash’s previous releases, KGF: Chapter 1 (2018) and Chapter 2 (2022), might be among the few Kannada blockbusters (besides Kantara) that lay Indian audiences have largely watched, and evidently, loved.
This was belated reacknowledgement for a film industry where the likes of Anil Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Mani Ratnam, Ilaiyaraaja, Rajinikanth, Jayalalitha once debuted in the movies from.
I could barely sit through the two KGFs. Which tells you three things. One, you needn’t take my opinion about Toxic too seriously; and that I don’t belong to its captive audience, anyway.
Two, my expectations from it were terribly low, to begin with; so, maybe, the movie’s worse than I felt. Finally, I’ve decided to employ the last cells left of my brain to figure what’s it that people might connect to this picture, after all.
The only possible prognosis is the Animal (2023) effect, if you may. That is, the beastly hero, who operates in the laws of the jungle he singularly lords over.
He goes, “Jiske route map mein jee rahe ho, uske route ko doubt mat karna; warna, root samait ukhad jaoge (Don’t doubt my route map, or you’ll get uprooted yourself).” It’s been 194 minutes of this. I seem to have grown roots in my cinema seat myself.
His appetite for bedding women he desires remains equally strong. He’s married to a Portuguese girl, while setting eyes on a hot circus performer.
That’s Kiara Advani. She’s observed an orgy of violence around this hero. The only time she gets upset and stops a moving car is when she goes, “Mujhe bitch bulane ki tumhari himmat kaise hui (How dare you call me a bitch?).”
Barring those two motifs, it’s hard to tell, if anyone — let alone the other female and male actors in the movie with a cigarette in their hand, in every scene — has any clue what this movie is about.
The side-effect of such nonsense can’t be strictly external. I notice, by the movie’s climax, the hero has, mentally, lost it as well. Good, why must we suffer alone.
Toxic movie review: Yash, and no; oh, please, no!
