Vague Visages’ The Toxic Avenger review (the second on the site) contains minor spoilers. Macon Blair’s 2023 movie (released theatrically in 2025) features Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay and Taylour Paige. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

The Toxic Avenger isn’t a franchise that would typically appeal to Legendary Pictures — who gave us Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy (2005-12) and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune pictures (2021-24), alongside some less “elevated” blockbusters — in the hope of rebooting it as a mainstream property. And yet, six years after Macon Blair was hired as the writer/director, four years after filming wrapped and an additional two years after the world premiere, a movie that maintains the punk spirit and cheap-and-cheerful sludgy aesthetics of the 1984 original finally arrives bearing the Legendary Pictures name. Blair has made what feels like an uncompromised vision, a tribute to the Troma Entertainment movies he grew up loving — with all their faults still intact as a feature and not a bug — that still frequently feels confounding due to a singularly offbeat tone out of step with the current slate of comic book productions. The Toxic Avenger isn’t unpalatable to the mainstream, but it quickly becomes evident why the film was left on the shelf for a couple of years.

Personally, I was left charmed after a first viewing of Blair’s take on Toxie, without ever feeling like it properly clicked into place. Through the utilization of practical gore effects, and a barrage of meta jokes thrown at the wall, the film manages to capture the feeling of a low-budget B-movie a budding teen filmmaker would make with their friends, where every A-list actor appears to have wandered into frame by mistake, and every other line of dialogue feels like an in-joke the audience couldn’t get. Unfortunately, in practice, this approach eventually stopped feeling like a middle finger towards storytelling conventions, and more like a low-budget variation of the Deadpool (2016-) formula, albeit without the corporate sheen that makes that brand of comic book meta comedy such an insufferable pill to swallow. As is the case with those movies, it’s hard to sustain the novelty of its style when it’s being utilized to cover up a conventional hero’s journey story — no amount of self-awareness can make those beats feel fresh. Eventually, I began to feel they’d shine brighter without an ironic semi-detachment.

The Toxic Avenger Review: Related — VV Double Review (1/2): Macon Blair’s ‘The Toxic Avenger’

In The Toxic Avenger, Peter Dinklage stars as Winston Gooze, a put-upon janitor still reeling from the death of his wife when he gets the news of a terminal cancer diagnosis. It is treatable, but his healthcare coverage doesn’t cover it — and fearing that his stepson (Jacob Tremblay) would be left without a guardian, Winston opts to visit Bob Garbinger, the sleazy CEO of his company (Kevin Bacon), to ask if he could be switched to a plan that would get him the treatment. This goes terribly and Bob immediately sends his sinister younger brother, Fritz (Elijah Wood), and the band he manages — an Insane Clown Posse-style troupe known as The Killer Nutz — to get rid of him. However, this plan is cut short when Winston falls into radioactive waste, becoming The Toxic Avenger, and becomes singularly invested in getting back at the powerful and the corrupt who led him here.

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Dinklage is intriguingly cast against type in The Toxic Avenger, with Winston neither cocky and charismatic, nor sullen and cynical — there’s an earnestness to him that’s not typically seen in the actor’s filmography. The protagonist is uncool yet never the butt of the joke, even if his social awkwardness is the source for most of the humor prior to his transformation. Winston is an empathetic figure where Deadpool’s Wade Wilson never could be (every bit as smarmy and willing to break the fourth wall as his alter ego). However, the initial characterization of Dinklage’s character does feel at odds with who he becomes post-transformation. Nobody is coming to The Toxic Avenger for a heartfelt story about a stepfather struggling to bond with his son, but once Toxie’s rampage kicks into full swing, it moves away from the human stakes which the introduction effectively uses to ground a more over-the-top splatter-fest. Blair is clearly having a great time as a filmmaker, being able to throw as many practically staged, imaginatively choreographed bloody fight scenes at the wall as his budget will allow (a concert scene is a particularly graphic highlight), but he gets lost in the chaos. Yes, The Toxic Avenger is a movie set in a deliberately heightened reality, completely divorced from any specific period, but it frequently loses grip on the human element that helps make it palatable in the first place, which increasingly makes Blair’s film feel like a slightly outdated genre parody, rather than a punk take on the superhero origin story formula.

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Perhaps the biggest issue with The Toxic Avenger is the self-awareness that it could never be too much of a box office smash (the post-credits scene even makes a joke of this), which made me feel the consistent distancing effect of a director trying slightly too hard to make a cult movie the original Toxie fans would lap up. The scrappy, underdog enthusiasm is evident throughout, and it’s to Blair’s credit that his film feels like a group of friends made a low-budget movie which just happened to escape containment. But that low stakes approach comes into conflict with the way it tries to court wider cult attention via its self-referential, genre-literate humor which we’ve already seen a major comic book movie franchise take advantage of. Appropriately for a movie which takes place in an indistinct period, The Toxic Avenger feels out of time in all that it’s paying homage to, both good and bad. It’s great whenever a franchise film can still feel like the unmistakable work of its creator, having not been watered down through studio notes and test screenings, but sometimes feeling a little rough around the edges can just feel a little, well, rough.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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