TOXIC: A FAIRY TALE FOR GROWN-UPS is a new Kannada-language Indian film that I went and saw at the multiplex on opening day last week. I’d been waiting for it since they played the trailer before RZA’s ONE SPOON OF CHOCOLATE and I felt like I’d seen God. I think it already left that theater, but maybe you can find it in your area, so I want to get the word out. I’m a TOXIC crusader.

I was already sold on the movie when I learned that American martial arts legend J.J. “Loco” Perry (competitor in BLOODSPORT III, choreographer of UNDISPUTED II) is one of the action directors. That makes it an event in my book. You might wonder why he’d want to go overseas to work behind the scenes after graduating to director with DAY SHIFT, THE KILLER’S GAME and AFTERBURN, but this was an opportunity he couldn’t turn down. In a Q&A at Big Bad Film Fest recently (as heard on Action for Everyone), he said that UNDISPUTED II was shot in 30 days, all the movies he’s directed were 42, Chad Stahelski’s upcoming HIGHLANDER was 125, but TOXIC was 225! It’s one of the most expensive movies ever made in India, and taking a whipping in their media for not making the money back. But ACAB includes armchair studio accountants, so I will break with those pigs and thank the producers for investing so much in my entertainment.

TOXIC is an operatic, ultra-maximalist gangster action movie co-written, produced and starring (in a dual role) a superstar called Yash, credited as “Rocking Star Yash.” That it’s directed and co-written by a woman, the former actress Geetu Mohandas, adds an interesting layer to its depiction of masculinity, which is so over the top there’s simply no chance we’ll ever be able to locate the top again. R.I.P. The Top.

Yash plays the narrator, Ticket, who tells us sort of a comic book origin story about how when he was a kid in the state of Goa his circus acrobat mother Nadia (Kiara Advani) blew herself up with grenades just as his estranged father Raya returned. But then his dad dumped him off a cliff. What kind of a bastard would do that, he asks, and then proceeds to tell us the life story of that bastard (also played by Yash).

So we’ve established that Raya is a very bad guy, but Mohandas pulls out every single trick in the action movie library to cinematically glorify the absolute shit out of him. His introduction was used as the trailer that got me to the theater, and what seemed like ludicrous advertising bombast turns out to be pretty much the style of the movie. The soundtrack is punctuated with club DJ airhorns and Hans Zimmer style BWAAAAAAAAAMPPPPs, and the visuals are even less subtle. Speed ramps, whooshy zooms, mechanized camera moves and every other visual that says look, everybody… the fact is, this shit that you’re looking at is FUCKING COOL.

In 1947 the gangster Fernandez (Kyle Paul, WOLF WARRIOR II) is having a funeral for his son, with all his enforcers on a swivel worried about whether or not “he” will have the audacity to show up. Well, he does. He tears in in a hearse, novelty horn honking, the bumper is attached to a jack attached to a detonator so that the pelvic thrusts of Raya and a beautiful sex partner trigger a series of explosions across the cemetery exactly as they climax. I’m not sure what happens to his lady, but Raya walks through the gates in one of the most filmatistically souped up entrances achieved so far in history.

After Raya’s expensive shoe kicks open the car doors, Mohandas and cinematographer Rajeev Ravi (her husband) fetishistically detail his tattooed fists, his many rings, his naked, scarred shoulders as he pulls up his coat, then slides his hand suggestively into his crotch to tuck in his shirt. John Woo’s ears probly get hot as Raya slo-mo struts into the flaming war zone, coat billowing, wielding a tommy gun as Fernandez yells “KILL THAT MOTHERFUCKER!” and dozens of armed mobsters answer the call, but might as well be running into a giant woodchipper. Some of them he takes out simply by stepping on a dying man’s machine gun and turning his ankle to aim. He takes time to inhale his cigar before saying, “Daddy’s home,” clearly confident that that is, for whatever reason, by far the most badass thing he could possibly say in that moment. (I have noticed that his McBain type lines never seem to make much sense in context. I want his victims to ask him to clarify.)

This is actually a two person massacre, because Raya’s older sister Ganga (Nayanthara) is also a badass, so she rides in on a motorcycle to help kill everybody. They’re there to avenge Fernandez, who they blame for their mother (Sanjeeda Sheikh) killing their father. They actually would’ve failed if not for Fernandez’s brother Salvador (Darrell D’Silva, WRATH OF MAN) turning on him and recruiting the siblings to take over his opium empire. The closest thing to a disappointing moment in this movie is that when Raya says he wants to burn Fernandez to ash and snort him like coke, this is the rare movie where it really seems like we might see that, but we don’t. (I will assume it did happen off screen.)

It’s fair to call TOXIC an epic, because it’s a 3+ hour movie and the story takes place across many decades, in a couple countries, with so many period sets built on soundstages, huge crowd scenes, similarly sized battles. It occasionally flashes back to the siblings’ traumatic childhood as orphan grave robbers, but mostly chronicles Raya’s brutal rise as a crime lord and his many loves. When he’s told to have a political marriage to Salvador’s daughter Rebecca (Tara Sutaria) he finds her in the bath tub and gets in wearing a full suit. She says she wishes he’d proposed, so he slides the trigger guard of his gun over her ring finger. A romantic.

But before the wedding he meets Ticket’s mother. Salvador’s mistress Elizabeth (Huma Qureshi, ARMY OF THE DEAD) and her brother Tony (Akshay Oberoi, JUNGLEE) arrange to have him ambushed by evil clown assassins at the circus. We’ve all been there. He blames the star acrobat Nadia, she challenges him, he can’t resist her, she tries to fix him. She’s the one who gives the movie its title. He asks oh, so you think I’m a bad guy? and she says “No, you’re just toxic.” So yes, I think it is pretty much using it in the sense of toxic masculinity. She recognizes what he’s been through and sees something good in him, so she hopes that it can be unlearned. We already know she’s wrong.

It was never going to be an easy relationship. On their first date he’s attacked by a crew dressed as nuns who tear off their habits to reveal sexy leather outfits. See, there’s something there about the virgin/whore complex, and as they do flying kicks and head scissors and shit he murders them in disturbingly sexually suggestive ways. (I think it’s fair to assume a point is being made here, because the other option is that the filmmakers didn’t notice Dr. Freud exploding and splattering all over them.) Raya had hidden Nadia safely in another room, but she comes out and sloppily shoots somebody to help him. Toxicity spreading.

He’s still supposed to marry Rebecca, and finds out at the wedding that Nadia is pregnant. Everybody starts turning on each other, and they really get Raya by forcing Nadia to kill his sister. Not her fault, but he never forgives her, that’s one of the answers to how he became such a bastard. After the intermission he’s grey and shaggy and drunkenly running an empire in Macau. Nadia’s in Goa alone with tears in her eyes, a baby in one hand, a full bottle of whiskey in the other.

When Raya decides to return to Goa we finally see that fateful day when he dumped his son off a cliff. This time we see that he had regrets, dove into the water to rescue him, then pulled a gun on him. (Real mixed messages here.) Told him to run. Lived the rest of his life knowing he was out there somewhere.

The last section of the movie is about old man Raya being haunted by that decision in the form of crazed Ticket showing up like a Joker or a Bane or somebody, ambushing his troops, stalking him. Yash as grown-up Ticket looks different from Yash as Raya because his hair is short and shaved on the sides, he has a Frank Zappa goatee instead of a giant beard, he has at least the illusion of being a little slimmer, his chest is shaved. He’s possibly gay coded? His fighting style is different because he’s a nimble parkour guy, and his personality is different because he does crazed speeches instead of stoicism. He holds a rave in a cave but also just likes to dance around to taunt his enemies. He does a moonwalk before impaling a guy on a shower head with the water spraying out of his mouth.

Meanwhile, yet another better-than-him woman, Melissa (Rukmini Vasanth), is trying to detoxify him. The meet cute this time is that she tries to suicide bomb him for bankrupting her father with his casinos. When she triggers the bomb he proposes they fuck and blow up together. She doesn’t really give a definitive answer, but they don’t, and he throws the vest out the window. When he cancels her father’s debt she’s intrigued enough to come back, become his lady, give him another son, try to straighten him out. But son #1 isn’t gonna let that happen.

There’s a ludicrous (not entirely original) plot twist, but it doesn’t hurt anything. In fact a movie this feverish probly needs to end on a crazy note or it’ll feel anticlimactic. You don’t start out with a bunch of exclamation points and then end on a period.

There were two other people in the theater with me, and they were laughing at all the same shit I was, but during the credits I got the sense that they did not like it, one of them calling it “the most senseless movie I’ve ever seen.” I wondered how exactly somebody would show up at this movie and not expect this movie. However, the reviews I’ve seen (all written by people with way more Indian film experience than me) are negative, so keep that in mind, and accuse me of exoticism if you want. But this level of bombast and swagger and flagrant style over substance, even this level of production value, is just beyond the spectrum of American cinema. I can’t help but get a rush from it. It feels like using an extra sense.

You know those scenes where a villain makes a big entrance, strolling in looking cocky and unconcerned, lighting a cigar, a long coat blowing behind him, a squad of henchmen surrounding him? I’m not exaggerating when I say Raya must have dozens of those. Most of them in slow motion. The best description I can come up with for this is a cinema of hyperbole. The score by Ravi Basrur and the songs by several others blast you with every aggressive form of music from dubstep to ‘80s style electric guitar noodling. There’s a song called “His Aura Hits You” that’s all about how awesome this guy is, and it plays over a montage that’s already about how awesome he is, a topic which will continue to be emphasized throughout.

I mentioned John Woo earlier. There is a part with doves, but they’re not beautiful, they’re flying around in the middle of a gun fight and getting clipped. Thematically this is a more evil take than Woo – it has some amount of sympathy for the devil, but not redemption, not even poetry. I’d say it’s more SCARFACE than THE KILLER. But I kept thinking of Woo because I imagine you take the most potent parts of HARD TARGET, turn them into an oil, freebase that oil, build an engine that runs on it, hit the gas pedal and go off a jump, that’s the tone of TOXIC. Those critics may very well have seen 100 movies driving at that speed, but I honestly haven’t. I am still at a stage in my life where if I see a movie where the main character is eating street corn in the back of the car while being ambushed and he’s mad that his wounded driver doesn’t give him a toothpick so he says “You’re fired” and shoves a grenade in his mouth and then walks away picking his teeth with the grenade key as it explodes behind him, then I feel I got my money’s worth. And TOXIC has a whole bunch of shit like that. It’s like some of Arnold’s lines in COMMANDO escaped and started their own religion.

I called it “style over substance,” but that’s just to say there is an overwhelming emphasis on the style. The substance is also there. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but that’s my job as the viewer. On the surface it’s a gangster movie, it’s a rap video, it’s the V.I.P. section with bottle service, it’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or MTV’s Cribs shot in Zack Snyder-vision. But I see Mohandas’ cartoonish triple underlining of every indicator of modern masculinity: the beards that must’ve required a team of experts to grow and manicure. The gorgeous detailing of athletic cut-suits and shirts, open and bursting with muscles, tattoos, chest hair, necklaces, rings. The cars, the guns, the clubs, and so many cigars. This guy is so proud every time he lights a cigar. He knows we’re gonna be impressed. These luxurious status symbols do not interfere with his ability to kill and to dominate, and those actions don’t stop him from attracting a long sequence of beautiful and strong women.

Mohandas gives Nadia and Melissa each a turn as the heart and conscience of the movie. They are kind and good and forgiving. They may or may not admit that the bad boy thing does titillate them. But they believe they can be with this toxic man without participating in his evil, they can start a family with him, and they can redeem him. For this they are not rewarded, and he ends up almost more broken than them, having spent years talking about “legacy” like the megalomaniac he is, but leaving behind nothing but broken lives, a massive body count and all the pain that comes with it. Don’t be this guy, and don’t be with this guy. It’s a simple message blasted through the biggest stack of speakers I’ve ever seen, and you can feel the bass in your ribs. If that sounds like a party to you, you’re invited.