The Toxic Avenger has the gross-out mayhem you'd expect...but also a surprising dose of heart

It felt wrong seeing 2025's The Toxic Avenger in my favorite hometown Cinemark. A dingy midnight movie like this one should be viewed in a rundown auditorium permeated with the slight twinge of cigarette smoke. The squelch of some random couple's lips (did they even but a ticket to THIS movie?) should constantly be faintly heard. Seats must be decaying and full of tears. Every step on the floor should result in one's shoes producing a sickening sticky noise. In other words, Macon Blair's Toxic Avenger is best viewed in a rundown domicile where Travis Bickle or Midnight Cowboy's Ratso could be seated next to you.

Instead, I witnessed the film in a ritzy, well-kept Cinemark auditorium in a cozy leather recliner seat. How surreal to see a Troma film projected in these suburban confines. The dissonance between the film and where it was being shown was tantamount to the Cinerama Dome reopening solely to house a 70mm Grandma's Boy revival screening or watching Come and See on your Game Boy Advance.

Even if it was surreal to watch The Toxic Avenger in the same movie theater that kept Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas playing for three consecutive weekends, that didn't stop this title from being a fine time at the movies over Labor Day weekend.

This new vision of the Toxic Avenger lore (first established in a 1980s B-movie from trash cinema empire Troma) follows janitor Winston (Peter Dinklage). He's already struggling to make it every day as a single dad to his estranged step-son Wade (Jacob Tremblay). However, his boss, Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon), is also killing Winston's town with radioactive sludge and dangerous consumer products. Winston's life goes from bad to worse when he discovers he has only one year to live. His job's insurance won't pay for a surgery that could save his life, and asking Bob directly for help only gets this janitor even more mockery.

Trying to secure money for that operation gets Winston on the wrong side of Bob's younger brother Fritz (Elijah Wood) and his maniacal oons, the Killer Nutz. These baddies kill Winston and dump his corpse into a vat of toxic ooze. Here, Winston transforms into a new green-skinned, hideous being called Toxie (voiced by Dinklage, played in a suit by Luisa Guerreiro). This unkillable creation might just be the key to helping save Winston's neighbors and taking down Bob once and for all.

The Toxic Avenger channels Borat Subsequent Moviefilm as a cinematic follow-up altering what material is considered "shocking". The first Borat was about making the jaws of moviegoers drop over how quickly ordinary people could become racist or xenophobic. The second Borat, though, made it surprising to discover compassion between people, such as the budding bond between Borat and his daughter or the kindness exhibited by Holocaust survivor Judith Dim Evans.

Similarly, Macon Blair's Toxic Avenger shrewdly tweaks its ideas around what's transgressive. As Blair himself said in a recent interview, nudity was a major gasp-worthy element in the original Toxic Avenger. Its story, meanwhile, focused on a wish-fulfillment fantasy of a nerdy guy getting the hot babe of his dream, while threats of sexual violence were also common in the script. In the new Toxic Avenger, what's presented as "shocking" (beyond the graphic violence, of course) is someone overcoming apathy to do something in a world rocked by pollution, gentrification, and corporate greed. Committing to a sincere ode to helping ordinary souls is unexpectedly subversive in 2025, when the new Captain America primarily focuses on reassuring audiences that corrupt old white men Presidents are actually very nice.

As the star of this summer's best big-budget blockbuster noted this summer, "maybe [kindness] is the real punk rock." It's a total surprise that a Toxic Avenger reboot would make that its ethos, but it's executed quite nicely. Blair's script also translates edgy anarchy into delightful bursts of graphic violence. Have you felt this year's cinema has lacked scenes where heroes reach into the asses of villains and pull out their intestines? Have I got a movie for you! It's all wild and silly (albeit way too heavy on CG blood) in a fittingly Troma fashion. There's enough scalp chewing and gruesomely dark demises here to make the genre movie freaks pleased as Dolphins watching Darius Rucker cry.

The one big issue Toxic Avenger can't avoid, though, is that being innately a remake with several famous faces in its cast means it can never quite capture the wild, unexpected glories of classic B-movies like The Miami Connection. Even a crafty evolution of the past is still tethered to yesteryear. Excellent low-budget 2020s films like Cannibal Mukbang, The People's Joker, or Annapurna Sriram's Fucktoys are the true modern heirs to the chaotic and creative world of trash cinema. This Toxic Avenger remake from the production outfit behind the Dune movies, meanwhile, can't escape a polished and calculated veneer robbing it of some of its impact.

That inevitable shortcoming creeps up with some other screenwriting defects, including having Taylour Paige's J.J. Doherty frustratingly often only reacting to outsized male characters rather than also being a fun unhinged figure. Also disappointing in the script is a third act that needed an extra dose of unpredictability. Even with these foibles, this new Toxic Avenger remains an enjoyable exercise, especially with its welcome doses of sinceirty. That quality is effectively communicated through a soulful Peter Dinklage performance. This esteemed performer refuses to phone in his Winston work, which gives the character engaging Jack Lemmon-esque energy before he transforms into Toxie. 

There's such an endearing underdog humanity in Dinklage's on-screen presence, including in Winston's very genuine attempts to bond with Wade. It's a welcome surprise to witness that dramatic conviction in a film like this. Props too to Luisa Guerreiro, the in-suit performer of Toxie. Her consistency with Dinklage's pre-established physical acting is remarkable. The two actors share this part seamlessly, maintaining a consistently superb level of acting.

It's also a welcome relief that the script lets most jokes or silly details, like Garbinger owning an underground laboratory straight out of Scooby-Doo, just exist without self-conscious quips. The Toxic Avenger operates in an outlandish world with street signs indicating that your destination is 69 miles away, dicks getting whipped out on-screen with an accompanying "BOING!" sound effect, and Elijah Wood randomly playing the pan flute. Macon Blair happily revels in absurdity rather than craft mocking meta-jokes about the silliness. That confidence, plus welcome doses of puppetry and excellent practical makeupo effects, results in enjoyable blood-soaked mayhem, even though it's disappointing that this new Toxic Avenger movie made no room for the "My Big French Boyfriend" song from the Toxic Avenger stage musical...

Highest 2 Lowest see's Spike Lee creating compelling new cinema out of a Kurosawa masterpiece

 

There are at least two Highest 2 Lowest scenes where Spike Lee reaffirms why he’s a legend. The first is a mid-movie train heist, the other is a climactic tête-à-tête in a recording studio. They’re marvelously edited, composed, and paced sequences working flawlessly to create absorbing tension. 39 years after She’s Gotta Have It, Lee’s camera is still so alive with fervor. And to think, he’s exuding that energy while committing what sounds like on par cinematic sacrilege: remaking an Akira Kurosawa movie. 

True, Seven Samurai became The Magnificent Seven to lucrative results, but that and 2022’s Living are the exceptions, not the rules. Who would want to touch this master filmmaker’s most powerful works like Drunken Angel, I Live in Fear, or the crime thriller High & Low? Lee and screenwriter William Alan Fox, though, nail this process by ensuring Highest 2 Lowest is no straightforward retread of an earlier work. High & Low’s narrative skeleton is transported to a story that could only occur in 2025 and with tons of material specifically reflective of Lee’s status in life.

Music industry elder statesman David King (Denzel Washington) can often be read as a stand-in for Lee, himself the long standing icon of his own artistic medium. Happily, this exploration doesn’t become a way for Lee to vent about “the young people and their phones.” On the contrary, one of the loving elements of Fox’s writing and Lee’s camerawork is the emphasis on empathy for the younger generation. It’s important, rather than a tragic inevitability, that the previous generation helps and nurtures new artists.

One of the film’s most gripping scenes chronicles a tense conversation between David and his son Trey (Aubrey Joseph). The former character is refusing to pay a ransom for the son of eternal friend Paul Christopher (Jeffrey Wright), who was mistakenly snagged instead of Trey. While David tries remaining aloof about the whole scenario, the understandably shaken Trey eventually explodes at his father and asks “why don’t you just pay the fucking ransom?” Finally, David is shaken and angry, but only at a younger person daring to defy him. This father chastises his son for swearing at him and reminds him whose roof he’s living under.

It’s a great two-hander scene between Washington and Joseph, not to mention a tragic microcosm of a world prioritizing “respectability” above actually helping people, especially when it comes to the restrictive standards for young individuals. Lee’s filmmaking exudes immense, albeit quiet compassion for Trey here, existing in a world where David is quicker to leap into action against swearing at one’s father than kidnapping. Also, in a likely unintentional bit of stinging political commentary, David is framed in this single-take scene underneath a blue-tinted poster of Kamala Harris. David’s wrapped priorities in this scene of domestic strife echo how that 2024 presidential candidate condemned pro-Palestinian protestors infinitely more sternly than Benjamin Netanyahu. You can do anything you want to people…just don’t be loud or swear, for the sake of folks over 55.

There's a deluge of compelling material in here dealing with age and mortality, including David pleading with framed figures of famous Black musicians in his office for advice in a moment of intense crisis. Highest 2 Lowest, though, especially excels as a transfixing thriller. That aforementioned train heist scene is an especially great display of Lee channeling some gripping Inside Man energy to keep audiences on the edge of their seat. It's also tremendous how much personality from everyday New Yorkers informs this set piece, from folks celebrating Puerto Rican Pride to excited Yankees fans on the subway. 

This great touch provides some Highest 2 Lowest's most enthralling moments (I was cackling so hard at Yankees fans responding to their train abruptly grinding to a halt), but also works like gangbusters accentuating the sequence's tension. The unseen kidnapper could be anyone out here in these dense crowds. David's usually isolated from the world in his penthouse or record executive office. Now, he's knee-deep in the proletariat and unsure of whether he's staring his adversary straight in the face. The multi-layered success of this scene emphasizing ordinary souls crystallizes how well Highest 2 Lowest functions on so many levels.

Alas, one grave flaw keeps threatening to derail the entire enterprise. Despite being a movie about a music executive, Highest 2 Lowest's original score from Howard Drossin. This musician worked as an orchestrator on prior Lee movies for the filmmaker's go-to composer, Terence Blanchard. That legendary composer is dearly missed here since Drossin's tracks are ham-fisted entities lacking any sort of inventive instrumentation or personality. On the contrary, his score often sounds like tunes that would be preloaded onto GarageBand or a public domain website. It's absolutely bizarre watching such amateurish tracks punctuate images of high-profile actors and crisp Matthew Libatique cinematography. 

Needless to say, the dissonance between professional visuals and clumsy music cues is endlessly distracting. If Blanachard couldn't do this movie, wasn't there anyone else to do the score? Perhaps Bobby Krlic, if Lee wanted to keep things in the A24 "family"? Tamar-kali's been overdue for a big movie; she could've done wonders here and given this thriller the propulsive score it needed.

If Drossin's work disappoints, Highest 2 Lowest's biggest pleasant surprise comes from a terrific ASap Rocky turn as the feature's primary villain. Though one of his first times playing a fictional character in a film, Rocky's an absolute natural at captivating audiences and carving out a new character. That third act recording studio tête-à-tête leans heavily on just his screen presence and personality...and ASap Rocky crushes it. What a glorious sight to see him more than holding his own against an icon like Denzel Washington. Delivering that kind of star-making turn alone ensures Highest 2 Lowest is no hollow retread of a beloved Kurosawa film. It's a strong motion picture in its own right, not to mention an unabashedly Spike Lee creative endeavor.

What cis-het white woman nonsense is the original Pitch Perfect?!?

 

Perhaps I hated Pitch Perfect because I didn't watch it in the best circumstances. This is, after all, a film designed in a lab to be experienced when you're a 12-year-old girl at a sleepover or a teenager in the theater with your best friends. A 29-year-old woman watching it alone in her apartment on a Thursday night might not be the optimal experience for consuming this Anna Kendrick star vehicle.

But let's not let Pitch Perfect off the hook. I've watched tons of silly pre-2015 movies aimed at younger viewers alone in my apartment and enjoyed them. Legally Blonde. D.E.B.S. (masterpiece!!!) The Princess Diaries. Heck, I even found outlandish joys in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and Herbie: Fully Loaded. The problem here is an aca-awful movie, not the confines in which I watched it. 

You know what separates supreme femme-centric cinema (I refuse to say the phrase "chick flick", blech) from the genre's slop? What differentiates the Legally Blonde's from the How Do You Know's? Like with musicals and horror films, it's all about conviction. You've got to commit to your outlandish premise or kooky characters. You can't chicken out on your silliest elements or suddenly transform a farce into a bunch of people delivering soliloquies about their personal arcs in the third act. 

The excellent Bottoms, for instance, concludes with a delightful mixture of grisly violence and irony-free smooching. But I'm a Cheerleader commits wholeheartedly to doing its own version of "stop the wedding!" sequence (albeit at a graduation ceremony for conversion camp attendees). 2008's Mamma Mia!, meanwhile, doesn't let slower, emotional renditions of "Slipping Through My Fingers" or "When All Is Said and Done" disrupt its drunk karaoke party groove.

Director Jason Moore and screenwriter (Kay Cannon*) exhibit no such chutzpah or fun in their Pitch Perfect creative vision. For those unaware, the film concerns withdrawn college student Beca Mitchell (Anna Kendrick) at college at the insistence of her father. Mitchell doesn't want to get close to anyone, she's just interested in getting out of here and pursuing her DJ dreams. However, she soon joins the school's a cappella group, the Barden Bellas, who are trying to shake things up this year by recruiting new talent like Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson). Bellas' leader Aubrey Posen (Anna Camp) strictly sticks to tradition and old 20th-century pop tunes for their performances. Beca, though, ends up getting an urge to shake things up big time in this domain.

I hate how everyone talks in Pitch Perfect. There's no more eloquent or artistic way to put it, this film's style of dialogue irritated me to no end. Every single character exchanges the same sarcasm-drenched verbiage. It's an entire movie of people talking like Ryan Reynolds. This doesn't just ensure that the individual Pitch Perfect characters fail to sound different from one another. It also guarantees that every inch of this feature is drenched in snark. Nobody can exhibit affection for anything (music, movies, cappella performances, etc.) without following it up with a snarky "well, that happened!" retort.

At one point, upon seeing that her fellow Bellas members waited up for her after she was arrested, Becca launches into a brief monologue about how this group could something special if it got with the times. A competent movie would've let this display of vulnerability sit on its own and simmer. Instead, Becca immediately follows that display of passion by going "oh my god, that was so queerballs."The mood of the scene has been punctured and, even worse, viewers have been forced to hear the most arcane of early 2010s internet slang. Pitch Perfect is a movie constantly reassuring viewers it doesn't care about anything. With such an abrasive attitude, why should I care what happens to these singers?

Also, why does Pitch Perfect have such contempt for its characters? Bobcat Goldthwait's intentionally bleak comedies like World's Greatest Dad have more compassion for their fictional denizens than this uber-mainstream yukfest. Singer Stacie Conrad (Alexis Knapp) is around only to get mocked for being sexually active. Singer Cynthia Rose Adams (Ester Dean), meanwhile, has one trait, and it's that she's a lesbian. You can tell because she's always groping other women without their consent.  

What's with all these tired slut-shaming and gay panic jokes? It's not even that they're "offensive." It's that they're so tired and lack imagination. These aren't characters worth getting invested in, they're just weird put-downs of women who don't adhere to a rigid standard of "proper" femininity (read: skinny, white, cis-het). It all results in a movie that's mean-spirited yet doesn't have the guts to go full-John Waters on its cruelty or darkness. It wants to instead be as much of a crowdpleaser as Legally Blonde or Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. Needless to say, that doesn't work. You'd need genuine bonds between women characters and constant fun to reach those levels, not footage seemingly cribbed from a gender-bent remake of Van Wilder.

Even more insulting than all that is how dismal Pitch Perfect's visual sensibilities are. I don't think Moore and cinematographer Julio Macat ever unleashed fun or unexpected camera positions the entire film. Nor does the position of the camera accentuate various punchlines. Instead, Moore and Macat keep the camera static and opt for unimaginative shot compositions whenever possible. That's true even when people are belting out tunes on stage. Other music-centric movies and musicals use crooning as a springboard for visually lively camerawork. Not so here. Stale framing permeates intimate conversations and splashy musical performances alike. There's no vivid verve in Pitch Perfect's visuals of characters singing. Instead, it's just the laziest, choppiest camerawork imaginable. 

Such slipshod imagery especially sucks all the energy out of a finale that, on paper, should've won me over without breaking a sweat. How the heck do you make me, of all people, find a musical finale focused exclusively on ladies jubilantly belting their hearts out insufferable? Center the whole sequence around a Breakfast Club homage, of course. Hinging the set piece around reminding audiences of a famous movie is such insulting laziness. While the SNL short Dear Sister uses pre-existing pop culture as a springboard for new comedic lunacy, Pitch Perfect is content to just regurgitate a famous teen movie ending. It's all good, though, because Becca earlier wryly criticized cheeseball movie endings. That makes it okay to indulge in a cliche. 

In every respect imaginable, Pitch Perfect is an off-key disappointment. It functions neither as a crowd-pleaser movie about women friendship nor a dark comedy centered on hysterically despicable souls. Instead, it's a vehicle for the most exhausted jokes about queer, fat, or non-white women. Moore also fills up the screen with so many interchangeable white dudes, including a flat, personality-free lead turn from Skylar Astin. Even the soundtrack is just a menagerie of 2009-2011 pop radio staples and truly terrible renditions of those tunes at that. How do you make "Party in the U.S.A." devoid of zip? Such is the magic of Pitch Perfect, which constantly undercuts seemingly surefire recipes for cinematic joy.

I do have to give this project one major kudo, though. Pitch Perfect has finally convinced me I have the courage to watch Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. I'm sure there's plenty of depraved, disturbing, and nightmare-inducing imagery in that feature. However, nothing Pasolini can conjure up will possibly be even a tenth as disturbing to witness as a Pitch Perfect sequence where Anna Kendrick sings an entire "No Diggity" verse. A wise Dan Olson put it best: "this is cringe." Beyond making me feel more prepared for eventually confronting Salò, Pitch Perfect, like Charlie Sheen jokes or "epic bacon" memes, is early 2010s culture that needs to rot in the past.

* = Between Pitch Perfect and 2021's Cinderella abomination, I'm beginning to think Cannon's delightful and surprisingly moving 2018 comedy Blockers was a fluke. Seriously, how did the writer of those two bad movies also produce something as funny as John Cena not knowing how quotation marks work?