Starring Peter Dinklage, Kevin Bacon, Jacob Tremblay, Elijah Wood

Directed by Macon Blair

Legendary Pictures / Troma Entertainment / Cineverse – in Cinemas now

When a downtrodden janitor at a polluting pharmaceutical factory is doused in biohazardous effluent he develops superhuman powers, and armed with his glowing toxic mop fights corruption in the name of truth and justice.

When is a cult not a cult? This is a question that haunts every critic, regardless of how clearly it’s enunciated.

Full disclosure: I’ve seen a lot of splattery horror comedy in my time but I confess that the original 1984 Toxic Avenger movie passed me by as did the three follow-ups in the franchise. This shouldn’t be a problem. Any decent film – whether or not it’s part of a series – ought to be able to stand on its own two sprocket holes. Coming late to a franchise, or watching a really good reboot can often act as a gateway to greater joys, sparking one’s curiosity to track down the original material. Indeed, a reboot should be exactly that, rebooting not just the content but the audience as well – bringing new eyes to a much loved cinematic universe, and making new connections to whatever zeitgeists have evolved over the intervening decades.

It’s not that I wasn’t entertained. Peter Dinklage is always watchable and Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood and Jacob Tremblay are surely going to bring a bit of class to anything they sign up to, but while the first twenty minutes of The Toxic Avenger are certainly fun – peppered with knowing, post-modern gags to tickle the paid up splatter horror afficionado – the joke soon wears thin. Even I can only laugh at decapitations so many times… perhaps twice, on a good day.

As I was puzzling as to quite why I was losing patience with it so quickly, it dawned on me that it was the A-list nature of the casting that was the problem. I love Peter Dinklage as an actor. He makes good script choices, and he brings intelligence and a unique, muscular physicality to every role along with that wonderful, world weary face, with eyes that ooze a strangely potent cocktail of both derision and sadness. The trouble with casting him as the titular avenger is that from twenty minutes in he’s stuck in a green monster suit for the rest of the movie, and frankly it could be anyone. As for the others, if the schtick of your film is that it is deliberately ‘bad’ – so bad it’s good – then that’s just fine if the actors ‘belong’ in that genre. When they have reputations to protect it forces them to metaphorically nudge-nudge-wink-wink so that you know they’re only mucking around (Kevin Bacon is particularly guilty of this as the camped up villain of the piece) at which point the whole thing becomes little more than an end of term student revue, full of in-jokes which won’t land with anyone who wasn’t there from day one of Freshers Week.

As the movie hit the eighty minute mark it had definitely used up all its goodwill but there was another twenty five minutes to go, by which point I had stopped caring, and stopped laughing, and stopped caring that I wasn’t laughing. It was a late night showing and I just wanted to go home. I resolved never to bother catching up with the original – cult or not – which I guess answers the question at the head of this review.

Verdict: If 107 minutes of repetitive splatter comedy is your thing then The Toxic Avenger  will do just fine. Any given ten minutes of it is perfectly enjoyable, but string them all together and you might be tempted to decapitate yourself just to liven things up in the cinema. 5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com