Review: Cocktail 2 — ★★★☆☆

Cocktail 2 looks good and knows it, Sicily photographed like a travel brochure, its three leads styled and lit for maximum appeal. Kriti Sanon is the one performer who does more than occupy the frame: she shifts registers within scenes with real control, easily the most alive thing in the film. Shahid Kapoor commits fully to a role built around being the reason for everyone else's chaos, and mostly sells it.

The film itself is less certain of its own politics than it needs to be. It frames its love triangle as a progressive inversion of the genre's usual setup, but the actual plotting keeps circling back to the same possessive, comfort-versus-passion tropes the genre has run for a decade, without much new insight underneath the gloss. Rashmika Mandanna's character gets the least room of the three to actually register.

Three stars for a film that's better cast than it is written, carried almost entirely by two performances doing more work than the script asked of them. Homi Adajania knows how to shoot a beautiful location. What the film actually thinks about the people in it is less clear.