After the four-and-a-half-minute trailer for Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, you’d think that critics would know what they were walking into: an over-the-top Indian gangster film with very loud special effects, fast editing and plenty of deadpan performances. And yet, Yash’s long-awaited 19th film — he returns to screens for the first time in four years — has been met with mixed reactions, some calling it his best work and others calling it average at best. Directed by Geethu Mohandas and shot simultaneously in Kannada and English, the film (which currently has a 44% Tomatometer and a 45% Popcornmeter score) arrives today dubbed in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam in 18,000 movie theaters. The question is whether audiences will agree with the criticisms.
There’s one thing that’s consistent across all the first reviews of Toxic: Yash, who co-wrote the script alongside the director, is the film’s biggest asset. Plenty of reviews have singled out his emotional intensity and commanding screen presence. That, alongside Toxic‘s big action sequences and supporting work from Kiara Advani and Nayanthara, is said to be the highlights. But the screenplay is where things seem to fall apart.
Many reviews state that the film is dragged down by a slow first half, a very tangled structure, and a very long 3-hour and 15-minute runtime (that’s 194 minutes!). One reviewer dubbed it “the Saaho of Yash’s career.”
Other reviews found that Toxic just doesn’t feel fresh, especially since it pulls from Yash’s KGF persona — arguing that the action and the character feel too similar.
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IGN scored it just 5 out of 10 and called it “oppressively overbearing and cut within an inch of its life in the vein of a modern movie trailer.”
FirstPost scored the film 2.5/5, writing, “At times, it feels as though you are watching the movie in 0.75x speed. At 3 hours and 15 minutes, Toxic could have benefited from some serious trimming.”
For now, Toxic has done the one thing every big release wants — it’s got everyone talking.
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