Without reading a single review, I ended up watching Cocktail 2.
The reasons were simple. I generally enjoy watching Shahid Kapoor on screen. More importantly, I consciously avoid content drenched in violence, gore, and darkness. In today’s entertainment landscape, whether on OTT platforms or the silver screen, finding a film that promises friendship, romance, and relationships feels almost comforting.
Unfortunately, that comfort was short-lived.
Within minutes, I found myself wondering why I was investing my time in a story that felt so thin, superficial, and disconnected from emotional reality. Some films leave you inspired. Some entertain. Some provoke thought. Cocktail 2 left me bewildered.
At its core, the film revolves around relationships, yet none of them feels convincing enough to care about. The “test” devised to check the trustworthiness of a long-term partner felt less like a plot device and more like an assault on common sense. If trust is the foundation of love, then surely manipulation cannot be its measuring stick.
Even the friendship, which is meant to anchor the narrative, appears fragile. When one friend encourages another to tempt her partner before marriage, one cannot help but wonder whether the friendship itself deserves scrutiny.
The emotional logic never quite lands.
Neither of the female protagonists evokes empathy. Their motivations remain sketchy, their actions difficult to relate to, and their emotional journeys largely unearned. This certainly wasn’t the heady cocktail the title promised. In fact, midway through, I felt like calling the server and asking for the drink to be replaced.
What makes the experience more disappointing is that the film gets almost everything else right. The visuals are stunning. Sicily looks breathtaking. The people are attractive. The wardrobes are fashionable. The parties are glamorous.
But beautiful scenery cannot become a substitute for storytelling.
More than once, I wondered whether I was watching a romantic drama or a tourism campaign for Sicily.
Cocktail 2 borrows the aesthetic of its predecessor but forgets its soul.
It recreates the glamorous settings and relationship conflicts but overlooks a fundamental truth: audiences connect with emotions, not situations. We remember characters because we see parts of ourselves in them. Here, the characters simply move from one dramatic moment to another without inviting us into their emotional world.
Perhaps age changes what we seek from entertainment.
Today, I find myself drawn towards stories that celebrate ordinary lives, everyday relationships, and the quiet complexities of being human. Stories that leave behind warmth rather than turbulence. Stories that understand that simplicity is not a weakness.
Where have those stories gone?
Where are the intelligent rom-coms, the slice-of-life dramas, the gentle romances, and the friendships that do not need betrayal as a plot device? Where are the films that make us smile, pause, reflect, and perhaps call someone we love?
As the credits rolled, I wasn’t angry. Just disappointed. Yet, interestingly, the one moment that stayed with me came in the film’s final scene, a messy cupboard.
Each one of us has one. Relationships are often like that cupboard. Untidy, imperfect, cluttered, and perhaps impossible for outsiders to understand. But hidden within are shared memories, private jokes, compromises, scars, routines, and countless little moments and stories that we know and cherish as individuals.
What appears chaotic from the outside may hold a deeply personal order within. We return to our same messy cupboard, which holds everything we seek and hold close. It has it all, from elaborate dressing to an old T-shirt that gives us comfort. A metaphor for relations: we own them completely, we love them, and we feel responsible towards them. Some relations may not even fall within the order of the societal fabric, a little messy, imperfect, but humane and authentic, for the comfort or the Sukoon that the relationship brings.
And perhaps that’s what I was searching for all along, not perfection, or glamour, but authenticity. Because in the end, stories endure not because they are stylish, but because they understand the human heart.