Yash's latest film, Toxic, has hit cinemas after several delays.
Geetu Mohandas directs the sprawling gangster saga.
Kiara Advani, Nayanthara and Huma Qureshi also star in the blood-drenched saga.
Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups stomps to theatres with a busload of expectations and curiosity. The pairing of a distinctive filmmaker like Geetu Mohandas, who can twist and interrogate genres as she did in the wrenching Moothon (2019), and a superstar, Yash, is one of the most provocative bets to have surfaced in mainstream Indian cinema. It’s a great pity then Mohandas’ voice gets sanded under the crushing, loud antics of this blood-soaked saga around men, guns and guilt. There are stray glimpses that the filmmaker wants to say something about the nihilism of the violence that carry on from one generation to the next in a tired, self-defeating cycle. In a departure from genre staples, Mohandas also seeks to voice the intense self-loathing hidden underneath men on bloodthirsty rampages. However, Ujwal Kulkarni’s scattershot, frenzied edit constantly drains both poignance and any sustained mood.
This is a scrambled tale of fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, husbands and lovers. It’s about desertion, trauma of abandonment, being knocked sideways by love after being used to the world’s many cruelties. But emotional and psychological rehabilitation can happen only after the man looks at his mirror, instead of being on the run and escaping through bullets, casual sex and conscience-free behaviour. Raya (Yash), the central gangster gradually rising through ‘40s Goa, prides on his “allergy” to morality. The brother-sister duo of Raya and Ganga (Nayanthara in a vision of unbending resolve) pop up in Goa, overrun by the Portuguese, a land where the underworld has bought out the police. Raya and Ganga are each other’s strongest allies. She has raised him through the toughest of times, surviving clutches of their own mother who slaughtered their father and was keener to sell her off. Ganga’s heart has frozen over, shutting out love for anyone else other than Raya. He does her bidding. When she urges him to plot taking over Goa, he gets to it.
They come up against and induct themselves into the inner circles of Salvadore (Darrell D'Silva), who commands much of the state’s sway. There’s also his mistress, the wily Elizabeth (Huma Qureshi) who might have more than a few secret ploys up her sleeve with her brother Tony (Akshay Oberoi). With his unapologetic, often tactless brawn, Raya seizes control over the opium networks, widening Salvadore’s reach. Hot-headed, he doesn’t miss a chance before hacking off hands and heads. Salvadore, who’s higher on the hierarchy, aims to marry Raya off to his daughter, Rebecca (Tara Sutaria). Raya can charm any woman and things have been going smoothly with Rebecca. However, the intrusion of a circus performer, Nadia (Kiara Advani), complicates matters of the heart. Raya, who never thought himself capable of romantic love, discovers it, startled. Nadia is able to make him face the tenderness he has long buried. She sparks the gentle ache for a calm anchorage, pocketed deep within Raya’s callused heart. But how long can they hold onto the fragile flicker of pure love? Soon, the brawl of gangsters and familial engagements crashes into their brief, stolen idyll.
Leaping from Goa to Macau, the action in Toxic is eye-glazing, bouncing between the one-man-army Raya is and a generic, inconsequential assortment of powerful men whom he provokes. Yash does have sizeable charisma which flies him through wildly implausible stretches where his Raya is just mowing down hordes of men. The period piece boasts a number of staggering sequences mounted by DP Rajeev Ravi, a circus shootout a clear standout. But Ravi’s stupendous compositions are frequently marred by exasperating slow-motion, unyieldingly overwrought drama. The sheer decibel level is the harshest onslaught. This is a ridiculously stylish film, which could have retained way more coherence if only the editing didn’t keep thrusting in, amping up dynamism to a grating degree. Toxic also feels a tad torn between propping up Yash with swashbuckling allure and the pathetic mess Raya is. Just to endure the star’s umpteen heroic entrances at fixed intervals quickly gets tiresome.
I watched the Hindi dubbed version which went atrociously out of sync on way too many counts. The dialogues are engineered more for drawing whistles than hitting organic passages. The only portions they don’t become too distracting are in the star-crossed Raya-Nadia romance. Their scenes heave with emotion and doomed yearning. Yash is also on double duty as Raya’s son, Ticket, who blazes into the second half as the ashes of violence that re-emerge as a haunting. It’s the son who challenges him, mocking what grand history he’s written by destroying every woman in his life. It’s pretty remarkable to witness a man unleashing such insanity be actually called out instead of the standard-issue glorification reserved in every other work by a male filmmaker. In the second half, Raya is still footloose with his guns, but he’s exposed as someone crumpled, sunk within his violent, alcoholic impulses.
That Mohandas is acutely aware of bringing a female lens to a genre historically defined by masculinity is underlined every now and then. She’s eager to discursively reflect herself as being in conversation with the genre’s emblematic excesses. The screenplay, which Mohandas co-wrote with Yash, is spattered with dialogues rebuking how the world of men like Raya works. In a pointed exchange, Qureshi’s Elizabeth calls out the adage of women being each other’s biggest enemies, how they turn to monsters in servicing men. Rukmini Vasanth gets the short shrift in a thankless, late entry that does little beyond flagging the inter-generational reckoning. But her role too is wielded in a way so as to force Raya to pause and see the long line of damage he has suffered and wrought. After all, this is a man who haughtily declares violence to be his language. But you keep wishing for a more cohesive, credible mapping of the gang wars, the interplay of characters and their double-crossing, all who are just thin, bland and purpose-free.
In Toxic, Mohandas infuses copious doses of accountability into a genre revelling in wanton male instincts. She keeps prodding what it takes vengeful, bitter men to stop. There’s scope for psychological intricacy here, as overwhelmingly demonstrated in an otherwise overstretched climax. What’s unfortunate is these meta-genre interventions sorely lack the padding of a detailed, immersive period padding. The canvas seems vast yet vague at the same time, sporadically blinking alive when the women in it come forth.
