Cocktail 2 review: Shahid Kapoor, Rashmika Mandanna, Kriti Sanon serve up a misogynistic mocktail
Cocktail 2 has absolutely nothing to do with the 2012 original, Cocktail, starring Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone and Diana Penty, aside from a remixed song and the returning director, Homi Adajania.
Cocktail 2 populated by caricatures and not characters, set in locations that feel like postcards and not actual, lived-in places.
Laziness in mainstream Bollywood isn’t conditional; it’s constitutional. Cocktail 2 is a mocktail of a movie; sugary slop pretending to be the real deal. It’s populated by caricatures and not characters, set in locations that feel like postcards and not actual, lived-in places. Perhaps this is all by design; perhaps inauthenticity is the aspiration. But there has to be an element of truth even in the most far-fetched of falsehoods; there has to be something for those being duped, in this case, the audience, to latch on to. You could put Cocktail 2 under a microscope, or dip it in a chemical, and you still wouldn’t be able to decipher what truth it’s trying to get at. One thing is for sure, though, it is among the most misogynistic movies that mainstream Bollywood has made in a long time, which, for an industry that thrives on misogyny, is saying something.
It is emblematic of a growing trend in mainstream Indian cinema where even the slightest whiff of nostalgia is favourable to even the dumbest original idea. Cocktail 2 has absolutely nothing to do with Cocktail, the 2012 film, aside from a remixed song and the returning director, Homi Adajania. They could argue that this movie, too, revolves around a love triangle. But that would be implying that the original Cocktail invented this concept. None of the first film’s cast members — Deepika Padukone, Saif Ali Khan, and Diana Penty — are part of Cocktail 2. Instead, the new movie stars Kriti Sanon, Shahid Kapoor, and Rashmika Mandanna.
But this was part of the deal. Can you criticise a movie for doing exactly what it had advertised? When the results are this egregious, you sure can. Because why would any filmmaker willingly create a story about two grown women fighting over the same man in the year 2026? This, in itself, is the problem. The issue is that Cocktail 2 goes out of its way to portray the female characters, Diya (Mandanna) and Ally (Sanon), as scheming women while the object of their desire, Kunal (Kapoor), is shown as the victim of their manipulations.
Everything is fair in love and…
Kunal and Diya have been in a relationship for more than 15 years, we are told in a musical montage that was definitely concocted after the success of Saiyaara. More recently, they’ve been avoiding family gatherings because of the constantly nagging uncles and aunties poking their noses into when they plan on getting married. To get away from it all, Diya proposes a trip to Sicily, where the two bump into her old friend, Ally, played by Sanon. Ally is meant to be the stand-in for the Deepika Padukone character from the original Cocktail, the loose cannon who yanks the couple out of their complacency.
Unconvinced about Kunal’s commitment, Diya comes up with a harebrained scheme that Ally goes along with. She asks her freewheeling friend — we know this because Ally doesn’t live by society’s rules, has no fixed address, and seems to wear only bikinis — to perform what can only be described as a sting operation on her partner. The goal, Diya says, is to see if Kunal will fall for Ally’s seductions during the vacation. If he does, she’ll know that he isn’t serious about her. And if he succeeds in swatting Ally away, she’ll know that he’s a keeper. Diya calls this a “fun challenge”, while Ally describes herself as “garam chole bhature”. You can’t make this up.
Sanon obviously has the meatier role. Meanwhile, Mandanna is saddled with a wet blanket of a character who remains largely off-screen during the first half. But here’s a mildly controversial opinion: Kapoor can be really good when he wants to. His acting is often not the issue with his movies, which, in recent years, have been uniformly terrible. Even though the writing in Cocktail 2 is unintentionally hilarious and its tonal shifts jarring, Kapoor’s commitment is above reproach. Why he chose to do this, however, is a discussion well worth having.
The fear factor
The film’s obnoxiously gratuitous lens aside, it’s frankly disturbing to see stories like this being told in this day and age, stories where men are taken for a ride by women who claim to love them. “Dar ke rehta hai, aukaat mein rehta hai (Keep a man scared and he’ll stay in line),” one female character says proudly.
Cocktail 2 only gets worse as it goes along. Kunal is manipulated some more, while the women become crazier, after a point openly challenging each other to fight for him. The writers deliberately put a gag order on Kunal for over two hours, giving him all the power over the two women as he ponders whom to pick. “Why are you complaining? Two women are fighting for you,” Kunal’s father, who is meant to be the voice of reason, says to him towards the end. Cocktail 2 portrays this dilemma like it's the finale of Bigg Boss, when Salman Khan calls the two finalists to the stage and declares the winner by raising their arm.
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All these movies are starting to feel interchangeable now. For instance, you could very easily compare this to the recent Kartik Aaryan and Ananya Panday rom-com Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri, or, as the trade analysts like to call it, TMMTMTTM. You could also just pluck a random frame out of Kapoor and Sanon’s last movie together — the one where she played a humanoid robot — and not be able to tell the difference. It isn’t that both Cocktail 2 and Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya share the same stars and a similar attitude towards women; it’s that they’re also sloppily made.
Adajania and co. tried to pull a fast one on the audience this time with a promotional music video for the Tumi ho bandhu remix, where they talk of being trolled, winking as if they were in on the joke. But honestly, there isn’t all that much separating the synthetic visuals of that music video from the glossy aesthetics of the “actual” film. In an evolved moviegoing society, being involved in films like Cocktail 2 would be considered a career-killer. But here, it’s fashionable to pass the buck to the “fans”. The fans want a certain kind of cinema, they will say. The fans want to see their favourite stars doing the same roles over and over again. But who are these fans? Where are they? Oh, right, they’re watching Obsession for the fourth time in the theatre next door.
