In Cocktail 2, Shahid Kapoor plays a chef named Kunal, and he is about as convincing as Saif Ali Khan as a software engineer in the first Cocktail—that is to say, not convincing at all. Squint and you might spot the shadow of Diana Penty's Meera in Rashmika Mandanna's Diya and the spirit of Veronica (Deepika Padukone) in Ally, played by Kriti Sanon. Look a little deeper, and you realize that there isn't much difference between the two Cocktails: both are equally old-fashioned. They merely put on a facade of new-age attitudes and progressiveness. Beneath the hip surface lies an outdated moral core peddling conservative ideas about love and relationships. In Cocktail 2, for instance, Diya asks her friend Ally to seduce her boyfriend Kunal to test whether he is loyal to her or merely fulfilling an obligation. During the conversation, Ally playfully brings up a threesome, but Diya instantly brushes the suggestion aside. Diya and Kunal have been living together for years. They are not married in the traditional, socially sanctioned sense—saat phere and all—yet, in Kunal's words, they have done everything a husband and wife do. And anyway, Kunal and Diya seem to agree that they don't need to throw a big fat wedding just to impress others.
How modern! Cocktail 2, in fact, is so modern that Ally suggests Diya and Kunal free up their "boys" and "girls" by sleeping naked. There is even a shot of Ally nude in bed, her body strategically covered. Director Homi Adajania seems to be saying, "Relax, this is a new India ruled by youngsters who don't hide behind outmoded traditions." No wonder a song goes, "Karni thi mann ki kar li hai aaj / Mohe aayi na jag se laaj. Kaise niyam aji kaise riwaj / Mohe aayi na jag se laaj." Alas, like the 2012 Cocktail, this spiritual sequel, too, doesn't commit to that stance. It only pretends to be something it isn't—until it exposes its own hollowness and obsolete ideas. Diya and Kunal criticize wedding rituals, but the film ends by marrying them off through precisely those traditional customs. When Ally asks Kunal why he no longer goes wild with Diya, he replies, "Ab bade ho gaye hain." Yet he seems to fall for Ally's sensual allure like a hormonal teenager. You would think this might give us a complicated man, a character with shades of grey, but the movie ultimately presents him as a pure, almost blemishless soul. He is absolved of his "mistakes"—and I put that word in quotation marks because, according to the film, Kunal doesn't really make any mistakes at all. His only flaw might be that he often burps, which, too, is meant to be funny in an endearing manner.
Cocktail 2 has no problem showing Ally as a witchy villain who would readily betray her friend to steal her boyfriend, though it won't pass the same judgment on Kunal, who is supposed to be an ideal man and an ideal lover. It doesn't matter if he emotionally cheats on Diya or if part of him wants to be with Ally. Cocktail 2 is more than happy to portray him as a lost puppy trapped between the games of two women. Why not afford a similar gaze to Ally? Why not present everybody as morally complex instead? Why do we need catfights between Ally and Diya? This is where Luv Ranjan steps in. He co-wrote the film with Tarun Jain, and the two had previously collaborated on Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2. Ranjan brings with him his typical "men are superior to women" ideology, and Cocktail 2, in a way, feels like a tweak and an expansion of that scene from Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar in which Tinny hires a girl to seduce Mickey and lure him into cheating on her. The only difference between Cocktail 2 and Ranjan's 2023 rom-com lies in the women's intentions for arranging the seduction.
The lengths to which Ranjan's story goes to "purify" Kunal are laughable. To explain himself, Kunal likens Diya to a comfortable "purani fati jeans" and Ally to a bright, dazzling object. He says he may be attracted to the shiny object (Ally), but he will always return to his old, worn-out pair of comfortable jeans (Diya). First of all, to discuss women in terms of material objects is to rob them of their human dignity, and the most appropriate response to Kunal's explanation should have been a tight slap across the face from both Ally and Diya. Second, how is Kunal's analogy any different from that of incels who divide women into whores and marriage material? Third, the film's refusal to paint Kunal in prickly shades, while taking obvious pleasure in showing Ally and Diya as manipulative, not-so-smart women, tells you less about the film and more about the filmmakers. And fourth, if the "purani fati jeans" had really been fulfilling and comfortable, Kunal wouldn't have been so fascinated by the shiny new object. The fact that he is only underlines that something is indeed missing from his relationship with Diya, and that, unless it is addressed, he will continue to be drawn to other Ally-like women. The only difference is that he will suppress his desires instead of acting on them. And suppression does not equal absence. Kunal basically tells Diya that he will continue—if only quietly—to find other women hot and desirable, and Diya's response is, more or less, "Marry me, my dear." I half-expected her to sing, "Bhala hai, bura hai, jaisa bhi hai, mera pati mera devta hai." Of course, "pati" can be replaced with "hone waala pati" or "fiancé" or whatever.
This man-woman angle aside, Cocktail 2 is a failure on other levels as well. It is a love triangle that occasionally hints at greater depth, only to abandon it. When Ally hugs a man and cries, and when she, moved by Kunal's gesture of making kadhi chawal for her, throws herself at him so recklessly that they crash their car into a bush, you catch glimpses of a woman who has been sad and lonely for a long time and who, despite her cheerful exterior, leads a hollow life. The film, however, never digs into Ally's personal life to understand what has made her this way. Why does she fear heartbreak so much that she leaves men before they can leave her? Ally says she never allows any relationship to deepen, yet the film gives her so little interiority that the claim never acquires emotional weight and conviction. Apart from posing like a glamorous model, she is not allowed to reveal much about her tastes, experiences, or inner life. With such a thinly sketched psychology, she is simply let loose on Diya and Kunal, which is why she can, to an extent, come across as an unlikable homebreaker. We are never allowed to understand where she is coming from. Yes, she says she doesn't take no for an answer once she sets her sights on someone, but this is treated merely as an excuse for flimsy post-interval comedy drama.
The failures of both Cocktail films, ultimately, emerge from the impoverished imaginations of their respective writers—their fingerprints are all over them. I won't credit or admonish Adajania because these films do not belong to him. You can find him in Being Cyrus, Finding Fanny, and Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo. Even Murder Mubarak bears some trace of the director's voice, but when it comes to Cocktail, I suspect he signs up for such jobs mainly to raise funds for his personal projects. Adajania has his own unconventional, weird, eccentric voice, which isn't always tuneful (in the case of Finding Fanny and Murder Mubarak, it can be downright tuneless). Still, it is preferable to the impersonal work he turns in for films like Angrezi Medium, Cocktail, and Cocktail 2. With Adajania, I suppose, it is a matter of choosing the kind of discomfort you can live with: the discomfort of a lost hack or the discomfort that emanates from someone discharging a dense cluster of personally curated, artsy, occasionally annoying quirks. As for me, I would rather sit through the latter.
Final Score - [3.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times