Over the past month, a rumour that Rashmika Mandanna and Kriti Sanon were playing a couple in Cocktail 2 caught fire. It grew to the point that the stars were actually asked about this. It says everything about us and our cinema that the height of imagined transgressiveness in a film might be something as basic as a lesbian couple. It’s even more revealing that, instead of letting the question hang and using the free publicity, the makers immediately shot it down ("We are three straight people,” Mandanna told reporters). Sanon is playing an Ally, but don’t take it literally.
Kunal (Shahid Kapoor) and Diya (Mandanna) are one of those annoying couples too vaguely conceived to exist outside of a Hindi film, and too familiar to be interesting in one. He’s a chef, but we only see him in his restaurant in the first scene. She takes a phone call while walking purposefully dressed in a suit, so we can assume she works as well. He calls himself a Dilliwala but they seem to live in Gurgaon. There are friends and family, but these are just bodies to fill scenes.
For a couple that’s been together 16 years, Kunal and Diya are demonstratively, disgustingly happy. When he deflects a persistent relative’s questions at a wedding by saying they’re a married couple in all but name, it’s meant as a joke (they’ve had sex!). But an early song montage, one of the film’s neater ideas, bears this out. We see the two meet in college, start dating, her going abroad to study, their long-distance fights, making up, her panic when he gets covid. It’s a film in a song—potentially a better one than what’s to follow.
Driven up the wall by inquiries about their marriage plans, Diya proposes a holiday in Sicily. There they bump into Ally, a friend of Diya’s whom she hasn’t met in a decade. The writing baton between the first Cocktail (2012) and this one has passed from Imtiaz Ali to Luv Ranjan, and you’d know it just from Ally’s entry scene, sashaying down the road, winking at local boys spilling their drinks. She’s an overly handsy tango instructor, flirty, commitment-averse and single. It’s a horny teen’s idea of a hot girl.
In the run-up to their trip, Diya had been troubled by a drunken joke Kunal made at a party: that if he cheated on her, she wouldn’t know it. It continues to gnaw at her in Sicily, and she eventually approaches Ally with a proposal. Would she try and seduce her boyfriend? The way she sees it, if Kunal really wants to be with her, he’ll resist Ally’s advances. She calls it a “fun challenge”, which is one way to describe something so perfectly poised between demeaning and self-defeating.
This is pure male fantasy, hapless unshaven man thrown by devoted girlfriend into the arms of tangoing hottie. Homi Adajania directed the 2012 film as well as this one, and though the setup is similar, there’s a palpable change in attitude that can be put down to the differences between Ali’s conception of love, sex and gender politics and Ranjan’s (Tarun Jain is co-writer). While the original wasn’t any kind of classic, its sexiness felt freer, more charged with possibility. Here it’s forced and oddly conservative. The line in the trailer proposing a threesome got a lot of attention, but the film can barely bring itself to show people kissing.
Ally is the sort of Free Spirit who boosts a bottle of wine during a wine-cellar tour, but also hugs sad homeless men in the street. She’s always boasting about her no-strings love life, so of course she catches feelings, and of course the film becomes a fight between the two friends for Kunal’s affections. There’s no winning if you’re a female character written by Luv Ranjan: either you’re the manic pixie party girl or the steady girlfriend he compares to a messy cupboard (as a compliment).
Cocktail 2 is frictionless filmmaking, glib enough to provide the illusion of a good time. Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran’s photography is hideously bright and Insta-minded. The soundtrack is catchy but Pritam-by-numbers. There’s nothing at all apart from the central trio, and I couldn’t tell you a single useful thing about any of them aside from how they approach relationships. Nothing sticks, and maybe that’s the intention. Adajania won’t even commit to the contrived drama that builds before Diya and Kunal’s wedding, which Ally is attending as a ‘bridesmaid’; there’s a sudden lurch into manic comedy before Kunal tells the girls off one last time.
These were some of the other films released in 2012: Paan Singh Tomar, Kahaani, Vicky Donor, Shanghai, Gangs of Wasseypur, Barfi, Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana, Talaash. It’s hard to know what’s more depressing: that a middling film from 2012 is regarded as sequel-worthy in 2026, or that the sequel bears testament to how much Hindi cinema has stagnated in these 14 years. The gap between Cocktail 2's projected image and actuality is the difference between adventure and travel. If you’re the kind of person who goes to Sicily and craves kadhi chawal, this is the film for you.
‘Cocktail 2’ is in theatres.
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