Every frame of Geetu Mohandas’ aborted classic screams for attention. If you are the kind who likes his cinema soft, subtle, and tender, Toxic: A Fairytale For Grownups is not your thing at all. It is loud and showy, with prominent colours of anarchy plastering the pulsating pastiche of guilt.
Ah, guilt! It can be such a…ahem…toxic emotion, battering every human impulse in sight, pulverising the plot into a irredeemable chaos. Here, guilt becomes a celebration of the macabre, with characters popping out only to construct a causeway for the hero to hell.
The entire project seems to have been designed to flaunt Yash’s stardom. As Raya and his son Ticket (yup, that’s what the son is named), Yash gets to flaunt his muscles in nearly every frame. He is in every frame: taut, tense and tortured. The beautiful women are mere props to the protagonist’s road to doom. They perform a collective hysterical shriek, none more so than Kiara Advani, whose circus antics are in character with the film’s unhinged mood.
The hero’s catastrophic journey is a 3-plus-hour slog with some first-rate artwork and Rajeev Ravi’s enrapturing cinematography, which captures the unstoppable mayhem with dignity.
I’ve seldom seen gore given more grace. But grace under pressure could be deleterious, especially when the screenplay is so tidal in its course, it feels more like the storm after the calm than vice versa. The shootouts and the make-outs seem intriguing to begin with, but soon get tedious in their repetitiveness.
More than the story of a man fighting all odds with his sister by his side, Toxic feels like a vehicle to display Yash’s skills as a propulsive force. He fires guns well. But eventually draws a blank, as the script seems trapped in self-admiration.
Director Geetu Mohandas can’t stop preening at her own appetite for violence and sex. It’s all about the dead and the bed. Heads are blown off, and women are shown their place almost by rote. The entire lengthy film finally seems like an exercise in gratuitous violence with beautiful women thrown in for glamour.
While the costumes and sets suggest some amount of peripheral periodicity, the mood is redolent with modern Dhurandharisms which go against the film, as the action in Aditya Dhar’s film was more integrated . Here the stunts come on without a preamble. There are frequent gaps between the drama and the action which no amount of loutish background music can fill.
Fatally, everyone sounds like group chatters on WhatsApp spewing what they think is wisdom, when in fact it’s beautified balderdash. The unexpected twist at the end is so showy, it’s like a clown making a belated entry at a birthday party. Also, some of the plotting in the second-half is completely at odds with the climactic revelation.
Consistency is neither a favoured trait for the hero, nor his writers. Toxic A Fairytale For Grownups seems to be one of those films destined for greatness that takes the wrong turn early in its journey and lands face first on the slippery ground.
