Midway through “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” as Runway magazine faces the latest of many challenges to its future integrity and potentially even existence as a publication, now-jaded journo Andy Sachs bemoans the corporate repackaging of so much media into a smaller, cheaper, more efficient and less valuable facsimile of itself. She’s too polite to say “enshittification” — the buzzword that the internet has lately applied to this trend, with particular regard to online platforms — but it hangs almost audibly in the air. That’s a gutsy idea to invoke in a sequel aiming to recapture the glories of a much-loved media property from 20 years ago.
The good news is that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is not willfully enshittified. It’s a sequel made with intelligence and respect for both its predecessor and the legions who still love it, so much so that it functions less as a follow-up than as a kind of tribute act, albeit one featuring all the original talent — picking out the comic and dramatic highs from the first film and faithfully replaying them with the same moves and cadences. But it is, by almost any metric, a lesser movie: narratively, emotionally and cinematically flatter, buoyed by game performances that nonetheless steadfastly fail to surprise. And in almost every way that it falls short, it illustrates something that’s been taken from mainstream Hollywood moviemaking since 2006.
Let’s not overstate the bar set by “The Devil Wears Prada,” which arrived that summer as a smart, funny, fluffy bit of studio counterprogramming — in its opening weekend, it finished second at the box office to, if you care to remember, “Superman Returns” — in the pre-streaming days when female-skewing comedies weren’t a comparative rarity at the multiplex. David Frankel‘s film was no masterpiece, but it had remarkable cultural staying power: in large part thanks Meryl Streep‘s ingeniously underplayed turn as Miranda Priestly, a fashion-mag gorgon plainly modeled on Anna Wintour, in some part thanks to a fresh-off-the-runway wardrobe that fueled a million makeover fantasies, but also because its tale of a plucky intern clinging to a steep career ladder resonated with a generation of graduates entering a forbidding job market. As such it was both fairytale and cautionary tale for a certain strain of millennials, who have held onto it as a comfort movie of its era.
All of which is to say the original film’s artistic accomplishments are perfectly possible to emulate — or imitate outright, as the sequel (again directed by Frankel, and written by Aline Brosh McKenna) is mostly content to do. But that intangible touchstone status is harder to repeat, even as the new film — set two decades, one global recession, one global pandemic and an ever-mutating social media revolution later — likewise aims to capture the fraught spirit of its moment. That’s clear from the opening scene, which reintroduces Andy (a sleek Anne Hathaway, no longer gawky and hideous-skirted) as the socially conscious investigative journalist she always wanted to be, collecting an award for her work at fictitious left-leaning paper the New York Vanguard — right at the very moment that she and all her colleagues are fired by text, as yet another legacy publication bites the dust.
If this early turn will be greeted with sighs of recognition by anyone working in journalism, the chaser is less familiar: Andy is swiftly headhunted to be the new, extremely well-paid features editor of none other than Runway magazine, currently weathering a PR storm over a story that saw it accidentally endorse a sweatshop fast-fashion label. If Andy is there to give the embattled brand some serious journalistic cred, that cuts no ice with her old tormentor Miranda: As imperious and impossible to please as ever, she sets about challenging and belittling the new girl as if no time had passed at all.
Instead of chasing down unpublished “Harry Potter” manuscripts, Andy is instead tasked with securing an interview with elusive tycoon Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu, sorely underused); quietly scathing rival Emily (Emily Blunt) is no longer a Runway colleague but a Dior executive to be appeased; and the threat to Miranda’s queendom comes not from a French fellow editor, but a terminally unchic tech bro (B.J. Novak) looking to cut every possible corner.
But these are mere placeholder plot points. The essential dynamic is unchanged, so nostalgists can revel in the first film’s catty office politics, the unfailingly delicious chill of Streep’s withering delivery (“You are such a … fffffavourite,” she tells one cameoing super-celeb with a calculated hesitation that would cut mere mortals to the quick) and the counterbalancing warmth of Stanley Tucci‘s long-suffering creative director Nigel, still there to give Andy a tough-love pep talk at the most opportune moment.
As for Andy, she’s still out of place, but now with a grown authority that makes her a less vulnerable heroine, and so a less compelling one. She’s also handed a frictionless nonstarter of a romantic subplot with a blandly amiable Australian contractor played by “Colin From Accounts” star Patrick Brammall — though he gets more to do than Kenneth Branagh, inexplicably wasted as Miranda’s doting husband. (20 years ago, he was filing for divorce, today he’s a dedicated wife guy. Some things do get better.) The stakes aren’t as high for any individual character as they are for Runway itself, as the film’s glitzily Milan-set third act ultimately comes down to a battle for the magazine’s soul between a few billionaires with varying degrees of moral virtue — pretty true to life, perhaps, but not the stuff of great drama.
There’s fun to be had along the way, be it in Brosh McKenna’s amusingly brittle dialogue, or the bird-of-paradise spectacle of Molly Rogers’ costumes — though the baroque absurdist touch that couture doyenne Patricia Field previously brought to the proceedings is missed, as is the way the clothes were showcased by the first film’s crisp, gleaming look. Though DP Florian Ballhaus returns here, the grayish veil cast over scene after scene in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” tidily demonstrates how significantly standards of studio-movie lighting have shifted in recent years: Miranda Priestly herself would certainly have some words on this front.
Ultimately, however, the film’s chief pleasures are those of practiced professionals doing their job, and doing it well. None of the stars here is slacking, and their combined, easily resumed chemistry ensures that this sequel, for good long stretches, feels like old times — even if it’s hard to imagine fans of its predecessor cherishing repeat viewings to quite the same extent. Something that hasn’t changed, moreover, is Streep’s effortless MVP status: Her Miranda may now be too familiar to be menacing, but the hushed, lacerating economy of her line readings, the glassy reserve of her body language, the layers of passive-aggressive meaning she compacts into one arched brow or tight half-smile all invite a kind of in-the-presence-of-greatness awe. “Boy, I love working,” says Miranda quite sincerely, and so, it seems, does Streep. And work, as this alternately breezy and quite pessimistic crowdpleaser is quick to remind us, isn’t to be taken for granted.
