India, Aug. 31 -- I wanted to love Toxic. That is what makes writing about it slightly frustrating. This was not one of those films I walked into hoping to tear apart. Quite the opposite. I wanted Geetu Mohandas to win. I wanted Yash to prove that KGF had not become a cage around him. I wanted this strange, ambitious gangster drama to work.

And for a while, everything suggested that it would. The hype was enormous. The advance booking numbers were enormous. And then the film released. Suddenly, the conversation was no longer about how big Toxic could become. It was about what went wrong.

The Opening Was Not The Problem

Let's start with the obvious. Toxic opened like a monster. According to Sacnilk's estimates, the film collected around...