Twenty years is a long time to wait for a sequel. Long enough for the audience that loved the original to have lived entire lives in between. Children have been born and graduated college. Careers have started and ended. The world that existed in 2006, when “The Devil Wears Prada” became the movie that everyone’s wife dragged them to and that everyone’s husband secretly enjoyed, is gone. That world had print magazines on every newsstand and phones that couldn’t take a decent picture. Making a sequel to a film from that world is a bet that the characters matter more than the circumstances that created them. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” wins that bet. Barely, and with considerable help from Meryl Streep, but it wins it.
David Frankel directed the original, and he directs this one. Aline Brosh McKenna wrote the original, and she wrote this one. There’s something reassuring about that. When studios make legacy sequels, they often hand the material to someone new, someone who grew up loving the first film and wants to honor it, which usually means they’re too careful with it. Frankel and McKenna aren’t careful. They’re familiar. They know these people, and they pick up the conversation where it left off, which is the only way to make a sequel to a movie about conversation.
The setup is clean. Andy Sachs, played again by Anne Hathaway, has spent twenty years becoming exactly the journalist she wanted to become when she walked away from Miranda Priestly and Runway magazine. She has won awards. She has earned respect. And her entire newsroom gets shut down in the time it takes to read a text message. If you’ve worked in journalism at any point in the last two decades, that scene will hit you somewhere specific, because it isn’t exaggeration. I’ve watched it happen to colleagues. I’ve watched it happen to the newspaper where I spent the better part of my career. The film doesn’t linger on it. It moves on, which is also accurate.
Meanwhile, Miranda Priestly has a problem. Runway magazine, the institution she built and rules with the quiet authority of a constitutional monarch, is under threat. The details involve a corporate scandal and a board that wants her gone, and I won’t spoil them except to say that the film understands something true about powerful women in institutional settings: the institution will always look for a reason, and the woman will always have to be twice as good to survive. Miranda handles this the way Miranda handles everything. She adjusts her glasses. She speaks in sentences that contain fewer words than you expect and more meaning than you’re ready for. She wins.
Meryl Streep is the reason to buy your ticket. I interviewed her once, thirty years ago, for a film that nobody remembers, and even then, in a hotel conference room with bad lighting and a publicist checking her watch, Streep was doing something that most actors don’t do. She was listening. Not performing listening. Listening. You could see her take in a question, turn it over, and decide what it actually meant before answering. She does the same thing in this film, except she is listening to a screenplay, and the screenplay is good enough to deserve her attention without being great enough to challenge it.
That is the honest assessment of “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” It’s good enough. Streep elevates every scene she’s in. Hathaway, who has spent the last two decades becoming a far more interesting actress than the one who made the original, brings a weariness to Andy that feels lived in rather than performed. Emily Blunt returns as Emily, now a powerful figure in the fashion world, and she gets the film’s single best scene, a confrontation with Miranda that I won’t describe except to say it is the one moment where the movie stops being a sequel and starts being its own film. Stanley Tucci is there because Stanley Tucci should always be there, and his scenes have the comfortable warmth of a meal with an old friend.
But comfort is both the film’s strength and its limitation. The screenplay asks real questions about what happens to institutions built on taste when the world stops valuing taste, and then it answers those questions with a resolution that feels engineered rather than discovered. The first film had the courage to let Andy walk away from a world that wanted her to stay. This sequel doesn’t have that same courage with Miranda. It protects her. I understand why. Twenty years of audience affection for Miranda Priestly makes her untouchable, and the movie knows it, and the knowing makes the last twenty minutes less interesting than the first hundred.
I’m telling you this because I respect your time, which is the only promise I have ever made to the people who read this column. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is one hour and fifty-nine minutes long. It earns approximately one hour and forty of those minutes. The nineteen minutes it doesn’t earn are the ones where it chooses warmth over honesty, which is a forgivable sin in a sequel and a mortal one in an original film. This is a sequel. I forgive it. I wrote about the relationship between runtime and earned trust in my review of “The Brutalist,” and that standard applies here. This movie respects your time. It doesn’t demand it the way the best films do.
Here is who should see this movie. If you loved the original and want to spend two hours with characters you’ve missed, you will have a good time. If you care about Meryl Streep, and you should, because she is the finest screen actress of the last fifty years and she is still performing at full capacity, this is a reminder of why. If you’re interested in movies that take the death of print media seriously, this one does, for about forty-five minutes, and those forty-five minutes are the best thing in the film.
Who should skip it? If you never saw the original, this film will make less sense than it should, and I’d suggest watching the 2006 version first, which holds up better than you might expect. If you want something that takes real risks with its story, Sean Baker’s “Anora” is still streaming and does things this movie is too polished to attempt. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” plays the hits, and it plays them well. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s also nothing transcendent about it.
I saw it on a Sunday afternoon in a theater that was more crowded than I expected. The audience laughed in the right places. They applauded when Streep first appeared on screen, which is something that used to happen more often and should happen again. When the credits rolled, the woman next to me turned to her friend and said, “That was fun.” She was right. It was fun. It wasn’t the film it could have been, but it was the film it wanted to be, and sometimes that is enough.
