Toxic: An epic misfire, only for Yash fans   

By Pickle  August 27, 2026

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By Saibal Chatterjee

Big, ambitious, frenzied, stylised and driven by pulpy pizzazz, Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-ups, toplined, co-produced and co-written by Yash, takes wild swings at whipping up excitement around the actor’s presence in the cast in a dual role. But the movie itself is not for every palate.  

There can be no denying that Yash has phenomenal screen presence. He does not walk, he struts. He does not talk, he declaims. He does not light a cigarette he performs a full-blown ritual. He does not drink, he drowns in a bottle and lives to tell the tale.

You cannot take your eyes off Yash because there is never a dull moment when he is around. In the bargain, his unrelenting swagger allows no possibility of nuance or subtlety in the matter of character development. 

Playing Raya, a ruthless and unstoppable Goa gangster during and after Portuguese rule, as well as his estranged and embittered son, Ticket, he does indeed liven up the ultra-violent movie with characteristic broad strokes reminiscent of his hugely successful star turn in KGF.

But for everything that Yash brings to the table in order to please his pan-Indian constituency, the three-hour-plus movie itself is a slog if you are not accustomed to manga comic-style violence.

The likes of Takashi Miike and Takeshi Kitano would have approved of parts of Toxic because director Geetu Mohandas does not scringe on laying out the dark, disturbing and amoral world that Raya inhabits and holds sway over.

But for a film helmed by a woman and peopled by five female characters who do not shy away from demanding their pound of flesh even as they struggle to survive in a brutal, corrosive and unforgiving man’s world, Toxic does not go through with the radical steps that one might expect in terms of altered gender dynamics.       

Toxic is visually lush – cinematographer Rajeev Ravi and the production design team (armed with AI tools and CGI) leave no stone unturned – but the over-plotted narrative is beyond comprehension for a large part of the first half.

The movie throws a confounding array of characters, plot details and blood-splattered action blocks at the audience, creating a dense, disorienting fog that is well-nigh impossible to penetrate. By the time you begin to figure out what is going on and who is shooting at whom and for what reason, the relentless violence exhausts you out.   

It is only in the second half that things begin to become clearer as the web created by an unending series of acts of revenge and betrayal are untangled. Since the screenplay (credited to Yash and Geetu Mohandas) has no room for breathers, the action and bluster never stop.  

Toxic, produced by Venkat K. Narayana (KVN Productions) and Yash himself (Monster Mind Creations), is obsessed with guns, daggers and rapiers but it does not confine itself to just a handful of weapons. Everybody who is anybody in the film is armed and dangerous.

People are shot in the head, bodies are impaled and dismembered with machetes, heads are chopped off with chainsaws, and faces are smashed in without the perpetrators ever batting an eyelid. It is a benighted world where no rules of engagement apply and men, especially Raya and his abandoned son who returns to settle scores, are toxic to the core.

You think I am a bad man, Raya asks one of the three women he takes to bed. No, you are toxic, the lady replies. He does not counter her statement. He does not change his ways either. 

Toxic opens in 1947. India has gained Independence but Goa is still under Portugal. Somewhere down the line, the plot leaps to 1967. Goa is now free. Across these two decades, the narrative arc follows Raya’s rise in the Goa underworld and the expansion of his criminal empire beyond the shores of India and into the casinos of Macau.

Raya’s adversaries stand no chance. The man is invincible. There are a bunch of women in his life, including his elder sister Ganga (Nayanthara), who raises and protects him from the big, bad world until he is ready to take charge.

Ganga is a steely woman. The other women we meet in Toxic, especially Elizabeth and Nadia, are no pushovers either. If only they were in a Geetu Mohandas film that did not have Yash hogging all of it, they would have had a different story to tell. 

Raya falls in love with Rebecca (Tara Sutaria), daughter of his gangster associate Salvador (Darrell D’Silva), but before the relationship can culminate in matrimony along comes ravishing circus performer Nadia (Kiara Advani). Matters turn even more topsy-turvy.

On the night of the Raya-Rebecca wedding, Salvador announces that Nadia is pregnant with Raya’s son – it is never revealed how and why Salvador is privy to that private information when even Raya isn’t. Bloodshed ensues and the body count increases amid a hail of bullets.

Salvador’s mistress Elizabeth (Huma Qureshi) and her brother Tony (Akshay Oberoi) plan to eliminate Raya. During a visit to the circus, the protagonist is attacked by assassins disguised as clowns. But Raya being Raya makes short work of the assailants.

And that becomes the dominant pattern – every violent act is followed by a reprisal that is just as violent. After a point, the shock value of the killings plummets, reducing the action sequences to routine affairs.

No film directed by a woman anywhere in the world has probably spilled as much blood as Toxic does. Geetu Mohandas’ Liar’s Dice and Moothon, worlds apart from each other and entities from another planet when compared to Toxic, demonstrated her distinctive sensibility.

But any chance of the female gaze impacting what transpires on the screen and what happens to the women is completely snuffed out here except when, in a rare flash, a lady in Raya’s destructive orbit gets a word in edgewise.

In one scene, Raya tells Melissa (Rukmini Vasanth, who appears in the second half) – she enters his life when all else is lost – that she can stay as long as she can tolerate him. That diktat applies to Toxic as a whole. You will last the course only if you can take its in-your-face excesses in your stride.