THE STORY – Andy Sachs returns to Runway as Miranda Priestly navigates a new media landscape and Runway’s position within it. They reconnect with another former assistant, Emily, in a search for funding to ensure Runway’s survival.
THE CAST – Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Justin Theroux, Lucy Liu, Kenneth Branagh & Stanley Tucci
THE TEAM – David Frankel (Director) & Aline Brosh McKenna (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 119 Minutes
Twenty years later, David Frankel’s 2006 “The Devil Wears Prada” remains one of the mid-aughts’ biggest triumphs of commercial storytelling. Based on the scandalous novel by Lauren Weisberger, which lightly fictionalized her time working at Vogue magazine under notorious editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, the film became a cultural touchstone, earning multiple Oscar nominations and reinvigorating the career of star Meryl Streep, who played the devil herself, Miranda Priestly. Aline Brosh McKenna’s snappy screenplay (multiple lines of dialogue from which have entered the cultural lexicon) gave the world a deeper appreciation of the fashion industry. That industry was wary of participating in the film, but two decades later, they all came out to play for the (perhaps inevitable) sequel. “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” once again written by Brosh McKenna and directed by Frankel, manages to one-up the original in terms of its fashion bona fides, hosting a jaw-dropping amount of cameos, both human and sartorial, from across the fashion world. While it can’t hold a candle to the original’s flawless construction and efficient execution, this legacyquel still more than justifies its existence by expanding out from the original’s fashion magazine to the world of print journalism at large, mining more mature emotional content that reflects the many years that have passed since the original.
The film opens by mirroring the first film: Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) brushing her teeth before work. Gone, however, is KT Tunstall’s iconic “Suddenly I See”; Andy has made it as an established, award-winning journalist with a successful New York newspaper, so she doesn’t need an anthem of becoming. What she needs, as it turns out, is a protest song. Immediately before she wins an award at an industry function, Andy and her entire table of coworkers get fired via text. She takes a stand in her acceptance speech, which captures the attention of Elias-Clarke CEO Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman). The media conglomerate is under fire after Runway Magazine published a positive piece about a fast-fashion company that later turned out to produce its clothes in a sweatshop, so Ravitz hires Andy to do damage control and make the magazine respectable again as its new Features Editor. While she’s not exactly thrilled about it, she takes the job, and it’s not long before she’s banging her head against the wall trying to figure out how to please the ever-imperious Miranda (Streep). In the modern publishing world, Runway has had to go digital, with clickbait articles and reduced budgets, and neither Miranda nor her ever-reliable right-hand man, Nigel (Stanley Tucci), has fully figured out how to do that in a way that captures the elegance of the magazine’s legacy. If Andy can’t help them do that, and help them get back in the good graces of advertisers like Andy’s former coworker Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), then Ravitz’s tech-bro son (BJ Novak) might just cut them all.
Focusing on the struggles of print journalism in the 2020s, while a logical extension of the first film, it nonetheless feels like a pleasant surprise. While the first film touched on broader issues of how women are treated and expected to act to succeed in the workplace, it’s still mostly a coming-of-age story, following Andy as she struggles through hell to discover who she is and what really matters to her. The sequel, though, dives into a dying industry, asking existential questions about the place of journalism, particularly print journalism, in the current media landscape, to which it doesn’t have all the answers. It’s a bigger swing than we’re used to seeing from a big-budget Hollywood sequel. Frankly, it’s also one that can feel a bit off-putting, considering the amount of ostentatious wealth on display in a film about people desperately fighting to keep their jobs in an economy where they may not be able to get another. Thankfully, Frankel keeps everything moving at such a fast pace that there’s not much time to get too hung up on real-world issues like that. “The Devil Wears Prada,” for all its pretensions to be About Something, is really just a finely-tuned bit of escapist fluff, and the sequel follows suit.
The sequel also follows the original’s structure to a tee, which robs the story of some of its freshness. Nearly every major plot movement from the first gets replicated here, almost to the minute of where they come in the film’s runtime (shamefully, somehow ten minutes longer than the original). While Brosh McKenna smartly ensures that the issues impeding the characters’ progress have matured alongside them, that can’t stop the film from feeling like a retread of the first, especially when almost none of the dialogue here has the same biting wit that gave the original so much of its sweet-and-sour pleasure. Part of that is likely due to the Wintour factor. It’s no secret that much of the reason for the novel and first film’s popularity was due to its tabloid qualities; people wanted to see Miranda behaving badly so they could imagine the Vogue Editor-in-Chief doing the same (everyone had heard the rumors of what Wintour was like behind closed doors; this was just “proof”). The story for the sequel, however, is completely original, lacking the grounding factor of Weisberger’s experience to lend it a feeling of authenticity. The culture has also changed so much that Miranda could not be as delightfully, disdainfully devilish as she was in 2006. While the film has some fun trying to keep Miranda in line, the venom has been completely drained from Brosh McKenna’s pen. The insults in the first film stung, but here they merely poke; they’re good for a giggle, but you won’t hear people throwing around lines from this film in a decade the way they have “That’s all,” “Move at a glacial pace,” and the entire cerulean monologue.
Even though the dialogue lets them down a bit, all the returning cast members slip back into these roles like comfortable couture, effortlessly recapturing the spark that made these characters pop off the screen. Hathaway has always been great at big, broad gestures, and she knows exactly how big is too big. She does wonderful work peeling apart the layers of Andy’s personality – the clumsiness hiding behind the professionalism, the girl who just wants to fit in underneath the holier-than-thou journalist – and showing how they each complement each other. In her hands, Andy truly is an everywoman worth rooting for, no matter how many times she falls on her size-six ass. Streep suffers the most from the defanged dialogue, but she still makes a meal out of Miranda’s character arc. While Miranda doesn’t have a single moment as surprisingly revealing as the makeup-free hotel scene from the first film, Streep is an old pro at elevating a screenplay, and she does so here with elegant ease, finding lovely grace notes to paint a full portrait of this once-unstoppable woman just realizing she may be on the decline. The film shamelessly exploits Tucci for emotion in the last act after sidelining him far too much earlier, but the warmth he exudes in the role brightens every scene he appears in. Blunt is having the most fun of anyone in the cast, stealing every scene just as she did in the original film. The pinpoint precision of her line deliveries wrings every ounce of laughter out of them, and her side eye remains the deadliest in Hollywood. She’s a vicious delight, and well-matched with Justin Theroux, who’s all loose-limbed hilarity as Emily’s formerly chubby tech-billionaire beau. But she’s at her best opposite Hathaway, allowing Emily’s latent sweetness to shine through her flinty facade.
While “The Devil Wears Prada 2” isn’t too sweet, it could certainly use more sour notes. The callbacks to the first film get the balance mostly right, but outside of those nicely judged moments, the film can sometimes feel like Miranda struggling with the new HR guidelines: Trying to be biting, but turning out toothless. Stopping the film dead in its tracks for an Italian fashion show/music video, while fun, completely ruins its momentum right when the plot is about to reach its climax. Frankel’s commercial instincts (and Theodore Shapiro’s updates of his underrated original score) keep it entertaining, but for a film with this premise, it feels a bit weightless. That can be a good thing, especially when the film focuses on its cast of characters figuring out how to solve professional problems. The film is enjoyable, fleet on its feet, and provides some food for thought. But when said food for thought is as heavy as it is here, one can’t help but wish it was given a bit more space to develop. There’s a valuable message here about the importance of print journalism and the danger of technology pushing human creativity and ingenuity aside. Still, the sharpness of “The Devil Wears Prada” has been so sanded down for the sequel that it lacks the bite to make it truly memorable.
