Maybe, it’s not a compliment to start out comparing a film to Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s works. I can imagine how Toxic might have been pitched as something that ‘subverts’ Vanga, which is not quite the case. My most guttural response to it was, a Vanga film if it learned therapy-speak. This might be a reductive and over-simplistic response, but having mulled over it, this comes closest to my purest reaction to this (knowingly) campy, indulgent, loud, sweeping film, which has something most cash cows drop at the first slight inconvenience: a clear conscience. It has all ingredients that we’ve come to associate with pan-India blockbusters from the last decade – multi-ethnicity actors, cramped world-building, gargantuan action set-pieces, dialogues delivered like ad catchphrases, racy sex scenes featuring multiple women, and a three-act structure for key sequences – which means we’re subjected to the “hero’s entry” a dozen times.

The only twist here is that the film is directed by a woman. Geetu Mohandas (of Liar’s Dice and Moothon fame) goes out all guns blazing, like her protagonist. Now, whether I was less irked by the sex scenes knowing a female director was behind it, or if the scenes were aesthetically shot, can be a matter of debate. And there might be no clear answers. A distinct quality I surely noted was how the women seemed in control during the sex scenes, as agents of their own pleasure. Also, like her male counterparts, Mohandas doesn’t play coy while giving her star a film that adores him. But along with that, there’s also the climactic rebuke. Reciprocally, Yash goes out on a limb for Mohandas’s fable on abandonment, holding a mirror to his on-screen reputation for self-sabotaging machismo. The end product is a strange blockbuster that sells its soul, but not before burning bright in its self-indulgent excesses.

The year is 1947 and Goa, unlike the rest of India, still hasn’t got independence. Raya (Yash) joins hands with a Portuguese drug lord, Salvadore, becoming his go-to henchman. There’s no problem a string of corpses can’t solve. Like in most mass entertainers, Raya and his sister Ganga (Nayanthara) have an exploitative backstory about their mother betraying their father; where she even pimps out Ganga as an adolescent. It’s license enough for Raya’s distrust for people of the world, his preference for lust and violence, and his hyper-masculine outlook in life. He moved up the ranks so quickly that Salvadore sets Raya up with his daughter Rebecca (Tara Sutaria).

In Raya’s world, all good plans must burn. Enter Nadia (Kiara Advani), a trapeze artist bringing a travelling circus into town. As Raya becomes smitten by her, and she falls in love with him, he must choose between the business empire and love. Things get more complicated, when she’s pregnant with his child, whom Salvadore intends on killing, along with Nadia.

At 194 mins, I found myself occasionally bored and napping during Mohandas’s film because of the sheer repetition. He smokes/drinks, he kills, he f*cks. Repeat. I’d be tempted to ascribe more meaning to Raya’s two-dimensional characterisation, as a subversion of the flat female characters we’ve been served all these years. However, the women around Raya aren’t very deep either. As he goes through his spirals, after a tragedy, I couldn’t quite find any more insight into Raya – other than as a brute, who is actually a softie, scarred child within. A woman with a bottle in hand and smeared mascara, as shorthand for a ‘complex’ woman at war with herself, needs to go away.

However, there’s an individualistic style with which Mohandas films this rather straightforward tale. An action set-piece set inside a graveyard, a circus, a casino, a wedding banquet and lastly a snow-clad forest. To Mohandas’s credit, I was invested in Raya and Nadia’s tragic love story. In the song Tabaahi, they romp on the beach among other places (backalleys, her green room at the circus etc), much like another erotic thriller from two decades ago, Jism (2003). I wondered if instead of Vishal Mishra’s rock ballad, it would have been more interesting to go in the opposite direction like Jaadu hai Nasha Hai by M.M Keeravani. There’s even a similar shot of the two lovers in a car, of her teasing him while he drives. I was particularly transfixed during the first time Nadia is performing in a fish-bowl. It’s strikingly shot by Rajeev Ravi, and Jonita Gandhi’s vocals compliment Advani perfectly. I’ve never been a fan of Advani (even here, I don’t think she’s great), but that sequence was the most captivated I’ve felt by her.

I can imagine a version of this film that uses the template of a hypermasculine, violent film to introspect on the futility of all the misspent rage, the guzzling of alcohol, the ashen lungs as a result of all those cigars. Yash is an effective action hero. Unfortunately, as brave as he is to go that extra mile, he’s also limited as an actor to do much beyond brood, kill and stare in slow-motion.

For me, all the stars aligned in the film’s last 15 minutes. It’s unfortunate that it’s buried under the debris of watching three hours of world-burning. The twist (which I assume was a part of the original thesis for Mohandas’s pitch to Yash) worked for me. I’m afraid Toxic occupies a weird space where people might find it either too trashy, low-brow, or be taken aback by its operatic climax (which I found moving).

At the end of Toxic, I found myself annoyed at all the extraneous elements in the film. Almost like the film was an embodiment of its tough guy protagonist, who, under the affectations of tattoos, burly biceps, mercurial sensibility, hides his tender feelings. But maybe, this is close to the best we can get from a filmmaker-star duo bowing to commercial pressures, while also holding on to what they initially wanted to say. I can’t say I’d enthusiastically recommend this to anyone in my vicinity, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the film’s final stretch. That probably counts for something.

Also, there’s no part two announcement, yet. Phew!

Toxic: A Fairytale for Grown-Ups is playing in theatres

Published in special arrangement with TheWire.in