This Cocktail 2 article contains spoilers, click here for spoiler-free review, a Hindi version is below.
“Did you think Cocktail 2 is better than the first one?”
A friend cut me off when I started to casually tell him my (mostly negative) thoughts on the Kriti Sanon, Shahid Kapoor, Rashmika Mandanna movie.
But here’s the thing, that’s an irrelevant question. Cocktail 2 has nothing to do with the first one, except that this 2026 film pretends to be a love-triangle. It’s not really one.
Story spoilers ahead
Diya (Rashmika Mandanna) becomes convinced that her longtime boyfriend Kunal (Shahid Kapoor) might cheat on her, so she comes up with the least mature solution to a woman nearing her 30s: ask her friend Ally (Kriti Sanon) to seduce him and see what happens. And Ally agrees with surprisingly little hesitation. But well, she and Diya aren’t exactly besties, so their friendship loyalty has its limits.
Then, Cocktail 2 briefly pretends there’s a mystery. After a day of fun and some truly ‘cringe’ conversations, Ally and Kunal head back to the hotel, look like they’re about to kiss, and… cut to black. Ally wakes up alone under the sheets, making it seem like maybe they slept together. Maybe. The next morning, she and Kunal awkwardly agree to forget whatever happened because, well, they’re both adults.
But only viewers with very low emotional IQ will be fooled by this. Ally clearly made a move, Kunal gently turned her down, and that’s probably it. There’s no way two people who just hooked up would be this breezy about it, especially when Diya joins them the next day and everyone carries on like happy vacation buddies. And if they really did have a night of passion and can shrug it off this easily, then the supposedly serious love triangle is dead anyway.
Ally’s only pitch for why she’s better than Diya is basically: I’m more fun, relaxed, chill, and hotter. And she isn’t entirely wrong. The fact that Diya asks another woman to ‘test’ her man is problematic behavior at best, and that’s where Cocktail 2 starts becoming annoying and frustrating to watch. There’s barely even a love-triangle comedy here. The second half is almost unwatchable.
It doesn’t even make sense that Diya still wants to marry Kunal. If you genuinely think your partner might cheat on you, that doubt isn’t magically going to disappear after the wedding. Trust is a pretty basic foundation of a relationship. So either Diya is actually confident Kunal won’t leave her and does the whole ‘test’ thing for her own amusement, which is wrong but at least understandable, because people do love creating unnecessary drama in their lives. Or she genuinely doesn’t trust him. And if it’s the latter, why the hell is she marrying him? Ah yes, social pressure.
Whatever, this film is a big waste of time. Kunal still goes with Diya in the end, even after she pulls the horrendously inappropriate stunt of inviting Ally’s parents to the wedding and claiming she has a ‘surprise’ for them. What’s even going on in her head? She thinks Kunal will probably choose Ally, and they’ll what… get married instead?
Diya is a blazing red flag and should’ve been dumped. But one can tell right from the start that Cocktail 2 had no intentions of such an ending. And yet, Kunal’s strongest argument when Ally confesses her love for him is that he cannot break up with a girl a few days before the wedding.
What was even the point of this film? If Cocktail 2 really wanted to mess with its central relationship, it could’ve at least been provocative enough to admit that yes, sometimes relationships can crumble despite a decade’s worth of history and foundation. Instead, it creates all this drama only to chicken out of doing anything interesting with it.
The one thing Cocktail 2 does have in common with the first Cocktail film? The guy obviously chooses the slightly more sanskari girl, not the free-spirited wild child. In a Bollywood film, the manic pixie dream girl always loses.
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