Tubi’s Toxic Harmony is a deeply unconvincing thriller set in the thick of the music biz. Ashley Love-Mills plays an up-and-coming singer who lands a recording contract with a pair of high-roller producers hiding a sinister agenda, and the movie feels like a letâs-quick-whip-it-together project calculated to capitalize on recent revelations about P. Diddyâs criminal infamy. Or maybe itâs just coincidence and Toxic Harmony lucked into being relevant. Or, to be more accurate, and probably more generous, relevant-adjacent.
TOXIC HARMONY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The first scene of this movie is so generic it surely was purchased in a black-and-white package with the words COLD OPEN on it in block letters: A woman comes home after a long day, plops down for some takeout and realizes an intruder lurks in her apartment. She rushes to grab a butcher knife â hint: next time, try rushing for the door first, or maybe the phone to call the cops â but itâs to no avail. The shadowy figure leaves her MURDERâD. Who is this killer? You just hold onto your horses, pardner, youâll find out. Next, we get a second cold open, starring Darla (Lauren Darlene), a nutty lady who escapes from a drug rehab center so she can repeatedly leap out from behind dumpsters and phone booths and, uh, Redbox DVD dispensers to accost our protagonist and warn her not to do the things sheâs doing lest she end up like Darla, acting nutty and jumping out from behind large rectangular things on the street.
Speaking of our protagonist, thatâs Constance (Love-Mills). Sheâs part of a three-member girl group with high hopes: hit songs, sold-out arena tours, bowls of M&Ms consisting only of the light brown ones, etc. If only they could get along, or lip-sync in a remotely plausible fashion, or didnât name themselves âGeminiâ despite the fact that thereâs three of them in the group. They derail on stage during an industry showcase, and itâs the last straw for Constance. Her boyfriend, Lucas (Donovan W. Carter), tries to hold them together, but he might as well be trying to stop a white dwarf from going supernova by covering it with aluminum foil. Not at all ashamed of her totes-garbs stage performance for some reason, Constance makes her way into the VIP area, where she meets Tyree (Barton Fitzpatrick) and J-Money (Jamal Lloyd Johnson), two dudes with a lot of music-biz swagga. Not that we get any kind of context for their success, mind you â they could be rinky-dinks or Jay-Z equivalents, who can tell? But with names like Tyree and J-Money, they MUST be important as all shit.
Anyway, they mostly laugh Constance right out of the room, but she so-youâre-telling-me-thereâs-a-chances her way home and cons her way into Tyreeâs office the next day and makes him close his eyes and listen to her sing. She can carry a tune in a bucket, tops. But Tyree thinks sheâs sliced bread, and before you know it, BAM, he signs her to a recording contract and sheâs up in the studio cranking out hits, being sad that J-Money makes her sing songs that other people wrote, getting somewhat famous (a characters says she sees Constance âall over her socialsâ!) and wondering what it might be like to kiss Tyree instead of that big boring dummy Lucas. Is this too good to be true? Youâre damn skippy.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Toxic Harmony is so sloppy, it makes a Tyler Perry unintentional laff-riot thriller look like LâAvventura.
Performance Worth Watching:
Memorable Dialogue: Constance beefs with her Gemini bandmember who wants to put a new song in the set: âIâm not playing a song called âLoosey Pussy.â It doesnât even rhyme!â
Sex and Skin: Nothing heavier than some light camera-ogling of ladies wearing skimpy lingerie.
Our Take: Toxic Harmony is a shack made out of cardboard and rubber bands trying to pass itself as, well, if not a towering skyscraper, at least a modest high-rise. The screenplay is fresh from the vending machine, the performances are stiff and awkward, the editing is shoddy, the characters are thin, bland stereotypes and the musical sequences are laughably bad. It trudges along, using half the run time to work through two, maybe three, key plot points. Itâs dull as dishwater. It sets the bar pretty low â this is a Tubi original, remember â but never reaches it, achieving baseline competency at best, and at worst deviates into outright nonsense.
Now, outright nonsense could be entertaining, inspiring a few laughs at its expense. But this film doesnât even aspire to be an OTT ludicrous slapdash bad-wig thriller in the Tyler Perry vein. âTongue-in-cheekâ isnât in its vocabulary, nor is âinterestingâ or âremotely memorable.â It just lies there stinking like the skunk you just creamed with your Geo Prizm. It sure makes heavy use of its 3.7 different set pieces, though. This movie has nothing to say and no wild twists to unleash, or even a compelling story to tell. Perhaps itâs trying to be a cautionary tale in the wake of the Diddy scandal, but I have my doubts, since the word âtryingâ implies effort, and thereâs very little evidence of that in this snoozy stinker.
Our Call: Toxic Harmony hits all the bad notes. All of them! SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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