Review: Toxic

Toxic opens with real scale: a stylish, Hollywood-inflected mystery sequence, a bold entry for Yash as Raya, and production values that make the enormous budget visible on screen. That opening promise doesn't hold. The first half runs on nonstop action with almost no clearly established conflict underneath it, introducing multiple female characters and villains without ever settling into a story you can actually follow, let alone feel something for.

Yash himself is the film's most reliable asset, particularly in a second role that asks him to work against the swagger that made KGF land, and he's clearly trying something different with it. But the film around him keeps undercutting the effort: a late psychological twist arrives after nearly three hours of chaotic plotting, too late to pull the pieces together, and dialogue that reaches for profundity lands as merely tiresome. Reception has split sharply by language version, with the English cut drawing the harshest craft criticism, but the core problems, thin character work and a script that mistakes volume for intensity, run through all of them.

Two stars for a film that had the budget and the star for something genuinely big, and mostly spent both on noise. Worth catching for Yash's committed dual performance and the sheer scale of the production; go in expecting spectacle over story, because that's what's actually on screen.