Toxic Isn’t a Bad Film Because It’s Ambitious — It’s a Confused Film Because It’s Several Films at Once

Balle Balle Radio Entertainment Desk

Yash’s long-awaited gangster epic promised a singular, era-defining spectacle. What audiences got instead was a screenplay pulled in too many directions by too many competing visions — and the friction shows in every overwritten line.

Toxic: When One Film Tries To Be Three Films At Once

There is a difference between a film that fails because it aimed too high, and a film that fails because it never decided what it was aiming at. Toxic belongs to the second category, and that distinction matters more than the box office numbers or the online discourse currently surrounding it.

The criticism directed at the film has often been framed as a punishment for ambition — as if audiences and critics are simply uncomfortable with a Kannada star attempting something bigger than a regional hit. That framing lets the film off too easily. Toxic’s problem isn’t scale. It’s coherence.

Strip away the marketing and look at what the film is actually trying to be. At its core, it wants to function as a large-scale gangster spectacle, built around female gaze aesthetics and Yash’s established mass-hero persona. But running underneath that is a second film — a darker, more psychological father-son drama, staged with the tonal ambitions of an art-house picture. Then there’s a third layer: the pan-India positioning, the multi-language shoot, the international framing, the insistence that this is not a regional film but a world event.

Three different films, one screenplay. None of them fully realized.

**A Screenplay Fighting Itself**

Toxic is credited to Yash and Geetu Mohandas, and the seams of that collaboration are visible throughout. Mohandas has spoken in interviews about her own process — writing one version, shooting another, editing into something else entirely by the time the film reaches the screen. That kind of instinctive, evolving filmmaking has a real tradition in independent cinema, where directors are given room to discover the film as they make it.

The difficulty is that Toxic isn’t an indie production. It’s a big-budget vehicle built around a major star’s image, audience expectation, and box-office pressure. A24-style improvisational filmmaking and tentpole-star cinema operate under fundamentally different rules. What reads as authorial risk-taking in a smaller film reads as structural confusion in a film this expensive and this loudly marketed.

The result is a screenplay where characters are introduced, given weight, and eliminated without their arcs ever paying off — a version of world-building that borrows the scale of Prashanth Neel’s KGF universe without the connective clarity that made that universe legible. Ambition isn’t the issue. Execution is.

The editing compounds the problem rather than correcting it. Sequences that might have landed with tighter framing are instead buried under excess length and unclear rhythm. Cinematography, performances, action choreography and production design have largely escaped criticism — it’s the story architecture underneath them that critics keep returning to.

**The Dialogue Problem: Depth as Performance**

Toxic’s dialogue writing deserves specific scrutiny, because it illustrates the film’s larger issue in miniature. Several exchanges strain visibly for profundity — metaphors about footprints erasing history, lines about real betrayal being more honest than manufactured loyalty. The intent seems to be philosophical weight. The effect, more often, is dialogue that announces its own depth rather than earning it.

There’s a useful analogy here: the smartest person in the room rarely needs to prove it out loud. Dialogue that insists on its own cleverness — that performs introspection rather than embodying it — tends to alienate rather than impress. Audiences are generally good at detecting when a film is telling them something is deep instead of simply being deep. Toxic’s screenplay leans into the former too often, and the effect compounds across a runtime already carrying too many competing ambitions.

**Why Alpha Got a Pass and Toxic Didn’t**

A useful comparison point is Alpha, released around the same period and also received unevenly — yet largely filed under harmless disappointment rather than genuine backlash. The difference isn’t quality parity. It’s expectation architecture. Alpha’s franchise was already understood to be in decline, and its marketing made no outsized claims about reinventing anything. Toxic did the opposite: extensive promotional messaging positioned it as a world event, a multi-language, internationally minded product built for audiences well beyond India, with Yash himself credited as actor, producer and co-writer, deeply embedded in the film’s creative machinery.

That level of declared ambition raises the cost of falling short. When a film explicitly tells its audience it is reinventing scale, and then delivers narrative confusion instead, the gap between promise and delivery becomes the story — regardless of how accomplished individual technical elements might be.

**A Familiar Collaboration Problem**

There’s historical precedent for what may be happening here. Bombay Velvet remains one of Hindi cinema’s most discussed cautionary tales about mismatched creative partnerships — an art-house-inclined director working with a major star, where Anurag Kashyap has since acknowledged, in his own words, that he could not fully deliver the traditional gangster-movie experience audiences expected from Ranbir Kapoor’s presence in the film.

Toxic risks repeating that pattern. The tension isn’t necessarily that Yash exerted too much control, or that Geetu Mohandas made too unconventional a film. The more plausible explanation is structural: a single film was being asked to satisfy Yash’s mass-audience expectations, a director’s psychological and tonal ambitions, and a producer’s pan-India commercial mandate — simultaneously, without one vision clearly subordinating to or integrating with the others.

**Studio Perspective**

The more interesting question Toxic raises isn’t whether the film succeeds or fails. It’s what happens when creative collaboration between a star with producing power and a director with an independent sensibility isn’t clearly negotiated before cameras roll.

Both instincts are legitimate on their own terms. A director drawn to psychological ambiguity and unconventional structure has every right to pursue that approach. A star seeking to expand his image into international, pan-India territory has every right to that ambition too. The failure isn’t in either desire individually — it’s in attempting to fulfill both inside a single, unreconciled screenplay, then compounding that indecision with editing that obscures rather than clarifies.

This is less a story about a film failing under the weight of ambition than a story about an industry still working out how much creative latitude a big-budget star vehicle can actually absorb. Independent cinema can survive a director discovering the film in the edit bay. A pan-India tentpole, carrying the expectations of an international audience and a superstar’s brand, generally cannot.

The deeper question worth sitting with isn’t whether Toxic overreached. It’s whether Indian cinema’s current pan-India moment is asking directors and stars to merge instincts that were never designed to merge — and calling the resulting confusion ambition, when it might simply be a lack of alignment.

— **Studio CarryOnHarry Editorial Desk**