Cocktail has a handful of moments and a few genuine sparks, but finally crashes and burns so spectacularly that it's hard to focus on the positives, writes Raja Sen.Why, Bollywood, why? Why this cold shower, this
Vicky Christina Bar-Bar-Rona? Why must you promise a potent, heady concoction only to water it down with clichéd club soda, like a sadistic bartender? Why must the most modern aspect of a contemporary film be the clothes the actors wear? Why must characters, in a bid to prove how blasé they are, flip themselves the bird while trying on said clothes? And why -- oh lord why -- can't films be as efficiently short as heroines' skirts nowadays are?
Homi Adajania's brightly glossy
Cocktail seems unburdened by any grandiose cinematic ambition beyond looking very good -- an aim it meets with highly attractive leads and rather excellent art direction -- and that's cool. If this were an American film, it'd star Katherine Heigl or Jennifer Aniston, perhaps both. It's
Love Triangle 101, and, if done well, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's all about knowing where you want to head.
Adajania starts off breezily enough, all effortless-flirting and shotglasses and dramatically teary mascara, but the threadbare and increasingly inane plot unspools halfway through, leaving us with a shoddy, frustratingly random sequence of events. The last one-third of the film features the kind of emotional melee that can only be rightfully resolved by handing one of the girls a samurai sword. Alas, no such bloody respite is offered.
Armed with mangoes and a marriage certificate, angelic orphan Meera (Diana Penty) comes to big bad London and finds herself stranded, a (possibly nearsighted) man shooing her away. Instead of taking the first return flight, she decides to hang back and live with Veronica (Deepika Padukone), a frequently drunk party girl she meets in a restroom. They have a blast playing dress-up till one of them lands a hound dog from Delhi called Gautam (Saif Ali Khan), who eventually assumes the position of a persnickety but fortunate Twitter user: you know, picking between two fine DPs.
So far so basic, yet things jar right from the start. Saif is visibly out-of-sorts as the roguish charmer, adopting an exaggeratedly over-the-top approach to flirting that comes across as plain obnoxious. It's the kind of crassness a Salman or Emraan could pull off easy, but Saif just can't muster up the street-cred, no matter how painfully overdone his
Dilli accent.
He's never awful; just out of place and trying hard to look young, like an embarrassing uncle trying to fit in with the cool kids.
The ladies are a great deal better, the dazzling Diana refreshingly natural as the simple girl, and a smoldering Deepika with her smoky eye-makeup doing the acting for her.
All three genuinely do look like they're having a good time, this camaraderie making for a reasonably enjoyable first half -- with an upbeat, sexy vibe --