What could be worse than a stupid film is a stupid film trying to act smart. Homi Adajania’s Cocktail 2 is a sequel which was not the least needed. It’s not even about the three characters we met in the first Cocktail. Saif Ali Khan, Diana Penty, and Deepika Padukone brought a rush of adrenaline to the first film.
Here, in Part 2, the three main characters are so self-serving they seem like pantomimes of the earlier trio, served up with dollops of dishy locations (credit must go to Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran for his stylish lensing of Sicily and Kriti Sanon’s navel-legs), ritzy rhythms, and endless partying.
The only fizz is the one we see emerging from bottles. The trio of protagonists are constantly boozing, that’s when they are not busy making a fool of themselves with their unbridled self-gratification.
So, get this. One fine day in Sicily, Diya (Rashmika Mandanna) tells her friend Ally (Kriti Sanon) to put her hot bod to productive use: please seduce Diya’s live-in, Kunal (Shahid Kapoor, who looks hungover even when his character isn’t).
Wait wait. It’s for a good cause. Diya wants to know if Kunal is faithful to her. This is an agnee-pariksha with condoms.
The plan backfires when Ally, footloose and fancy-free, actually falls in love with Kunal. Sanon, in her skimpily clad role, attempts to act like a woman in love who doesn’t show her true feelings to her friend. It’s an emotional double-decker bus which crashes into the nearest lamp post.
No part of this weirdly unfunny love triangle suggests any seriousness or even sobriety on the part of the threesome. What were they thinking?
One minute, Sanon’s Ally (the most selfish woman on Planet Earth) is sighing, drinking (that is a given for every occasion), and confessing her love to Kunal on the eve of his wedding to Diya, while Kunal’s deadpan expression gives nothing away (I suspect Shahid Kapoor is trying to hide his sniggers at the sheer absurdity of the situation).
The next minute, the threesome is in a mood for banter. They surely deserve one another. We deserve better.
The dialogues often turn to the most cliched responses in a love triangle, including if-not-in-this-life-then-next. The nudging self-mocking tone doesn’t help diminish the feelings that somewhere Homi Adajania is trying to make a joke out of modern-day conflicts about commitment and fidelity.
Before we get to process the thought-process which has gone behind this risible homage to the menage a trois, on come Rekha and Moushumi Chatterjee from Maang Bharo Sajana with Ally, brutally self-serving, asking Diya why she must get Kunal just because she met him first.
Good question. Why must one marry the first person he or she falls in love with? There might be another, much better than the first….Such are the logistic landslides that underline this brainless skin show, where the concerns never go beyond the skin.
There is no emotional consistency in the storytelling. One moment, Shahid and Kriti Sanon are trying to look intense and involved. The next moment, they are doing what seems like raillery at a wedding, which seems all wrong: the wedding and raillery.
The one getting the rawest deal in this slippery-when-wed burlesque is Rashmika Mandanna, wrong makeup, unconvincing role, and an absolute disregard for dignity. Which woman throws her partner on her buddy (luckily, a woman) and then watches him squirm? Pati Patni Aur Woe.
Kriti Sanon has some fun with her leggy part. But is eventually unable to pull off the various layers of subterfuge her role requires. The only hero of the show is Sicily. Sometimes you just feel like telling the silly characters to move out of the way. They are blocking the view.
