Tony Stark took a dark turn huh? Kidding, obviously, but in the superhero churn and burn malaise of 2025, a movie like The Toxic Avenger stands out because it doesn’t feel like any type of those films we’ve seen before. Maybe because Thor wasn’t bludgeoning people’s heads off with his hammer.
In the 2025 update of the 1984 B movie, Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage) is a struggling stepfather living in St. Roma, a hellscape completely dominated by the chemicals corporation BTH. Gooze keeps his head down, janitoring at BTH and rooting for his traumatized stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay) to nail with his “theater piece” but definitely NOT school dance at the talent show. But BTH and its CEO Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon) butt into Winston’s plans. 1) They cause a bad health diagnosis on incomprehensible health insurance for poor Winston, and 2) the janitor runs into JJ Doherty (Taylour Paige), a journalist looking for the smoking gun to bring down BTH’s nefarious shenanigans. I guess a hyper caustic mop will have to do.
The Toxic Avenger works because it pulled off what Sin City did. Watching the movie felt like a low grade indie comic book transformed into a movie in real time. St. Roma is filled with wonderful set design and broad stroke imagery, with each location called out like “Harbinger Mansion/secret lair”, complete with lightning strike to let you know it’s bad. The streets Winston live on are filled with trash and criminals just walking around everywhere, making it crystal clear what kind of place we’re in. Besides our hero, many of the costumes are gloriously over the top; I loved Elijah Wood’s right hand man plucked straight out of 80s bad guy hell. Even something as simple as the names (Kissy Sturnevan, Budd Beserk, a band called Killer Nutz), the level of detail Macon Blair provides to this tale makes it pop the way it does. The talented writer/director clearly adores the 1980s films this movie is remaking, and went to great lengths to make sure he recreated the feelings and essence fans of the OG will be thrilled by, and new fans like me will want to go back and experience thanks to this modern reinterpretation.
Turns out Reagan era critiques have only become more magnified in 2025. Corporations are even bigger, and drunk on their own power, making them a perfect villain, with Kevin Bacon and Elijah Wood wonderfully, sillily showcasing the front facing and back end shenanigans big conglomerates execute to maintain power. Speaking of drunk on their own power, Marvel and DC were long overdue for a critique of their soulless franchising, void of personality moviemaking. Toxie (as he’s affectionately called) operates completely in anger, and violently over the top straight up bloody disgusting murders a bunch of bad guys. He pisses acid and makes jokes about it to women. But in an angry world for angry times, this grotesque figure is our real avenging hero, channeling all the pain of the disenfranchised and taking out the enforcers of the status quo, secretly sweet and hoping to just be happy. Much of the humor is on the nose to make the punch lines clear, which works more than it doesn’t, including one time where I fell into a laughing fit (an incredible evisceration of the police).
I do fear franchising of The Toxic Avenger undercuts the message of the movie. So at this point with just the one film, it’s a nice salve in a movie world “studio notes”ing films to death. I would love to see the notes Macon Blair got for this movie though. “Um, could our hero NOT disembowl a person through removing organs through their asshole?” would have been incredible to read.