Toxic: a century on day one, and reviews from hell

The Toxic reviews are in, and they are at war with the Toxic numbers. Yash’s first release since KGF Chapter 2, four years and several abandoned release dates in the making, reported to have cost upwards of Rs 500 crore, opened on Tuesday to an estimated Rs 101 crore nett in India and Rs 140 crore gross worldwide. It also opened to some of the most hostile notices an Indian tentpole has drawn in years.

Geetu Mohandas’s film runs three hours and fourteen minutes, carries an A certificate, and drops Yash into 1940s Goa under Portuguese rule as Raya, an orphan who rises through a drug empire. Nayanthara plays his sister Ganga, with Kiara Advani, Tara Sutaria, Rukmini Vasanth and Huma Qureshi filling out the most star-heavy female ensemble any Kannada film has fielded. Rajeev Ravi shot it; Ravi Basrur leads the score.

The Tamil press went in with knives. Hindu Tamil called the film a three-hour tragedy that tests the audience’s patience, a full-length fight scene in search of a screenplay, and signed off with the observation that under-18s barred by the certificate are the lucky ones. Dinakaran needed one word for its verdict: garbage. BBC Tamil noted that the film itself hands the audience its review, quoting a line spoken on screen, “Does anyone understand what’s happening?”, as the question most viewers will be asking.

The national press was scarcely gentler. The Indian Express gave it 1.5 stars and found it full of sound and fury signifying very little. Hindustan Times went a star lower and called the fairy tale “actually a nightmare”. Mint judged it “thin as paper and empty like a broken promise”, while Anupama Chopra landed on “mostly a fascinating mess” and The Hindu filed it under ambitious misfire. The kindest mainstream takes, NDTV and OnlyKollywood at 3 stars each, praised Yash’s commanding presence, the craft, and a pre-climax twist, while conceding the writing sags under the length.

India Today’s sharpest piece skipped the star rating entirely and went after a broken promise. Mohandas had once pitched the film with the line “It’s a gangster genre with a female gaze. How about that?” The essay’s answer: five formidable actors, all defined entirely through Raya, as sister, lover, former lover, rival. Women everywhere on screen, and the film never once looks through their eyes.

Audiences have not been kinder. The big Reddit review threads read like triage wards: interval walkouts, complaints of a KGF hangover Yash never shakes off, the very template the teaser had promised to leave behind, and one much-upvoted crack that the film is edited like YouTube Shorts. The praise, where it exists, converges on Rajeev Ravi’s images, the period production design and a circus-set action sequence. Amid the pile-on, BookMyShow’s audience rating for the film quietly vanished from the platform, a disappearance the site has not explained.

For all that, the machine did its job. Trackers put the day-one century among the biggest openings in Indian cinema this year, more than half of it from the Hindi belt, even if it fell short of the bar KGF Chapter 2 set in 2022. The sore spot is Tamil Nadu, where rights sold for Rs 63 crore and the Tamil version’s opening day brought in a reported Rs 5.5 crore. Yash, for his part, already has his exit route mapped: he plays Ravana in Ramayana, due at Diwali, a film where somebody else wrote the screenplay.