The Toxic Avenger (2025)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Foxy Toxie

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

A wildly surprising gem of a reboot, way better than it had any right to be, Macon Blair's superhero spoof The Toxic Avenger is witty, goofy, and unexpectedly touching, probably the best of the entire series.

Winston Gooze (Peter Dinklage) tries his best to singlehandedly raise his stepson Wade (Jacob Tremblay). He works as a janitor for BTH, a large and corrupt drug company, but struggles to make ends meet. He is diagnosed with a brain disease and has less than a year to live, and then discovers that his company insurance plan will not pay for the medicine he needs. He confronts the CEO, Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon), asking for help, but is cruelly rebuffed.

Desperate, he launches a plan to steal the money from the company, but he is caught by Garbinger's brother and right-hand-man Fritz (Elijah Wood). He is shot and his body is dumped in a toxic waste pit. But rather than killing him, it gives him super-strength and regenerative abilities. When the villains kidnap Wade, Toxie teams up with the intrepid J.J. (Taylour Paige), who seeks revenge for what the company did to her mother, to save the day.

In an era when studios mine every half-forgotten C- and D-tier movie franchise for ideas, The Toxic Avenger was not one of the most promising. The original film and its three sequels, made between 1984 and 2000 by Troma Entertainment, were deliberate lowbrow gross-outs.

Happily, this new movie fell into the hands of Macon Blair, an actor in Jeremy Saulnier's excellent crime movies Blue Ruin and Green Room, who made his own writing and directing debut with the smart, quirky Melanie Lynskey comedy I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore. It's not exactly a path you would expect to lead to Toxie, but maybe that's the reason the movie works so well.

Peter Dinklage is another. He finds a wonderfully touching empathy, humanity, and vulnerability to Winston, raising a stepson and keeping a positive outlook in spite of bad news. It's also refreshing to have a diminutive superhero who inspires just as easily as a chiseled movie star.

The movie's weird humor hits just right, as when Toxie tries to use a fallen foe to lure another foe to meet his face, dangling the corpse from the corner of a building ("C'mere! I've got something to tell you!"). Taylour Paige makes an excellent cohort, quietly determined; when Wade asks her "are you like a detective or a spy?" she replies "no… I'm just angry." And Kevin Bacon, Elijah Wood (with his Penguin-like makeup), and Julia Davis ("my God you people are tedious!") make a fine, wacky trio of villains.

Overall, while this series traditionally aims to be irreverent, the new The Toxic Avenger manages to be somewhat inspirational. (Look for Troma fearless leader and director of the original Toxie movie Lloyd Kaufman in a cameo.)