Toxic Movie Review: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups

Director: Geetu Mohandas
Writers: Geetu Mohandas, Yash
Cast: Yash (dual role as Raya and Ticket), Nayanthara, Kiara Advani, Huma Qureshi, Tara Sutaria, Rukmini Vasanth
Cinematography: Rajeev Ravi
Music: Ravi Basrur (score), with Vishal Mishra, Tanishk Bagchi, Faheem Abdullah and Arslan Nizami on songs
Runtime: 194 minutes
Release date: August 26, 2026 (worldwide, timed to Onam)
Budget: An estimated 850 to 1,000 crore rupees, reportedly making it the most expensive Indian film ever produced

The Setup

Toxic arrives with the kind of pressure that comes from being Yash’s first film since the KGF franchise made him one of Indian cinema’s biggest stars. Director Geetu Mohandas, working from a story she wrote herself and a screenplay she co-wrote with Yash, sets the film across a period stretch from the 1940s through the 1970s, built around a Goa-based gangster named Raya and the empire of fear he builds. Yash takes on a dual role as Raya and a second character called Ticket, and the production spent over a year shooting across Bengaluru, Mumbai, Goa, Thoothukudi and Jaipur, including a 20-acre period set built outside Bengaluru to recreate four decades of production design in one place. That scale shows up on screen. Whatever else critics disagree about, almost nobody is calling this a small movie.

What Works

Yash’s screen presence carries long stretches of the film almost by itself. Reviewers who otherwise found plenty to criticize still singled out his physical commitment to the dual role, calling it his most menacing work since KGF. Rajeev Ravi’s cinematography gets similar praise across the board, with multiple reviewers describing the production value as lavish and stylish even when they had little patience left for the story wrapped around it. Ravi Basrur’s background score reportedly lands well in several sequences, even where the film’s actual songs, spread across four additional composers, don’t do much for the pacing.

The action sequences, choreographed in part by Hollywood stunt coordinator J. J. Perry, are another consistent bright spot. Several reviews describe a rough first half that only fully clicks once the story settles into its second hour, at which point the action set pieces and Yash’s performance start to justify the runtime in a way the opening does not.

What Doesn’t

The most common complaint across reviews is that Toxic never settles on what kind of film it wants to be. It reaches for gangster drama, family melodrama and revenge thriller all at once, and several critics felt none of the three fully lands. One review bluntly called the writing aimless and the emotional beats unearned, despite the visual polish surrounding them. Another described the first half as an overloaded traffic jam of style, introducing more narrative threads than the film ever manages to braid back together.

The nearly three-and-a-quarter-hour runtime comes up in almost every review as a structural problem rather than just a length complaint. Critics who otherwise liked individual scenes still felt the pacing tests patience, particularly in a front half some reviewers found genuinely difficult to sit through. A few reviews go further, describing the experience as closer to endurance than entertainment, with one calling out the film’s unclear tonal identity as the core issue rather than any single scene or performance.

The Verdict

Coverage on Toxic splits fairly cleanly into two camps. One side treats it as an ambitious, visually stunning gangster epic held back by a script that can’t keep up with its own scale, landing somewhere around 6 out of 10 or three and a half stars out of five. The other side is less forgiving, framing the film as style without substance, closer to a KGF retread in a different setting than a film that earns its own identity, with at least one outlet scoring it as low as 1.75 out of 5.

What both camps agree on: Yash’s performance, the cinematography and the production scale are the reasons to see this on a big screen, and the story is the reason expectations should stay modest going in. If you’re going for spectacle and a star performance, Toxic delivers. If you’re hoping the script matches the budget behind it, the reviews suggest tempering that hope before you buy a ticket.

Bottom line: A visually enormous, tonally scattered gangster epic that works best as a showcase for Yash rather than as a tightly told story. Worth seeing for the scale and the performance. Go in knowing the first half asks for patience the second half only partly repays.