From the guy who has starred in some great flicks comes a movie that was presumably made on a lost best: The Toxic Avenger, a gleefully absurd and gloriously gory action-comedy that is destined to become a cult favorite—but for now is a dumb, shrug worthy affair.
Writer/director Macon Blair, who starred in but didn’t make the excellent Blue Ruin and Green Room (but who I thought, up until the time of writing this review, did make the excellent Blue Ruin and Green Room—that honor goes to Jeremy Saulnier), helms this purposefully campy gore fest, which has Peter Dinklage becoming the title character, a gooey green deformed janitor who kills bad guys.
The Toxic Avenger looks and feels like a movie made in the early 90’s to fulfill a contractual obligation, to hold onto the rights until a better movie can be made. Storywise, there’s not much more to the film than Dinklage traipsing around and butchering people with a radioactive mop. It’s deliciously gory, but heavily reliant on CGI to deliver the blood and guts–a movie like this would really benefit from practical, over-the-top effects (I haven’t seen the original 1984 version, so can’t compare). The kills are fun to watch, but the movie so lacks substance it’s hard to really care about anything that happens.
Dinklage, when in non-mutated form, is good enough, but frankly he looks so ridiculous and unintimidating as the title character it just doesn’t work. Dinklage has a form of dwarfism, of course, and I appreciate that Blair cast him in a role that is height-agnostic, but a different approach to the character design and makeup would have gone a long way to help the celebrated star.
But Dinklage isn’t the problem. The Toxic Avenger is a campy mess, a movie so reliant on gory deaths that it fails to check several baseline boxes. Had it leaned more into the ridiculousness of it all, had Blair let Dinklage loose to go balls-to-the-wall crazy, it might have been something. This movie likely made sense to Blair years ago during the formation phase, but the elements are so rudimentary you wish they had been tossed in a barrel of toxic sludge–instead of being put to screen.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.