‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Review: The Long-Awaited Sequel Proves That Fashion is Always in Vogue [B+]
It’s been 20 years since Andy Sachs walked into Miranda Priestley’s office looking like a bargain version of Diane Keaton and walked out, throwing her phone into a fountain in Paris and quitting Runway. As we find Andy now, she’s back in New York after 15 years of ‘traveling around,’ to where and why we aren’t really privy to (“Different places!,” as Nomi Malone would say), but we do get the exact opening of the first film, with Anne Hathaway wiping her steamed bathroom mirror clean as she brushes her teeth, this time set to a new Dua Lipa song instead of the very iconic “Suddenly I See” from KT Tunstall. As Andy runs through the city, through the park, we get several nods to the original film (including the dual belt scene) that strike the right balance of reverence and nostalgia rather than simply hitting beats of remembrance. This is the “End of an Era,” as Dua cheekily sings, but the beginning of a new one.
In this new era, Andy is a ‘serious journalist,’ using Runway just as she said she wanted to, as a jumping off point to find and write about real stories. She’s at an awards ceremony for New York City journalists with her co-workers when they all get fired over text at the same time. Their parent company has, like so many media conglomerates now, decided to consolidate and squeeze out the entire investigative team of their fictional paper. Upon receiving her award from the org, she reveals the culling to the room and lobbies passionately that “journalism fucking matters!” It surely won’t go unnoticed that at any given press screening for this film, the rooms are filled with writers let go from huge publications and freelancers struggling to make ends meet in a far too fast excavation of their livelihoods.
But she’s not out of work for long as Runway comes calling after a scandal rocks the magazine (which finds Miranda Priestly on the verge of being ‘canceled’ over a pro-sweatshop puff piece) and Andy, although hesitant to return to the place that provided her with both torture and growth, realizes very quickly that being single and jobless in New York City is not a personality, much less a sustainable one. Walking into the hallowed halls of Runway now as its features editor, Andy feels a nostalgic twinge, mostly when she encounters the new version of her with Assistant #2 (comedian Caleb Hearon) and the new Emily in Amari (a delightfully distant but underused Simone Ashley). But what’s new is old again, and Andy enters Miranda’s office with the excitability of a child only to be met with the same aloofness as her first day 20 years ago. Although, the running gag that Miranda (a luminous Meryl Streep) doesn’t remember any assistant’s name or calls them all Emily, doesn’t quite land at first and feels a bit performative. It’s also odd that in those 20 years, Miranda is still Editor-In-Chief of the magazine and only now set to be promoted by Ira (Tibor Feldman) to Head of Global Content for Elias-Clarke (the stand-in for Conde Nast). It’s of little bother though, as Streep’s rare sequel return (outside of the mega-popular Mamma Mia! franchise) finds new spins on Miranda, with cracks in her icy exterior being broken far earlier than in the original film. Miranda is still a powerful force, but in the age of digital content, she’s a bit of a relic. “Is she watching the season finale of Yellowstone?,” mocks a random TikTokker.
To help cauterize the wound of advertisers fleeing, Miranda heads to Dior with Andy and the still there stalwart Nigel Kipling (the ever wonderful Stanley Tucci) where Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) is the visual director of their flagship store and relishes being on the other side of Miranda’s surgical needle of evisceration. Being 16% of all of Runway’s ad revenue, Emily gets to put Miranda’s feet to the fire, demanding pages of ad space and features in order for Runway to keep hold of the account. Blunt’s Emily in the first film was always a good foil for Andy but in the sequel she’s much more nefarious and grudges run as deep as the Hudson River. Blunt is up for the task; “Villains are always more interesting,” Miranda says, and Emily is even more of a scoundrel than the billionaire boys club attempting to take over the magazine. She also gets the film’s most likely line to live on with “May the bridges I burn light my way.”
When a tragedy strikes at the worst possible moment, Elias-Clarke is taken over by Ira’s dopey son Jay (B.J. Novak), who wants to gut it all and the mission for Andy, Nigel and Miranda, becomes clear. Save Runway at all costs. Especially when budget cuts have put Miranda in… economy.
Aline Brosh McKenna (Cruella, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) returns as writer but this is an adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s sequel Revenge Wears Prada in the loosest of terms. Andy and Emily aren’t business partners, Andy isn’t planning her wedding for Miranda to spoil. The book sequel was published in 2013, certainly as the world of print journalism was being squeezed out in place of online content but also a full decade before AI began eviscerating human jobs and writing, and that’s where the film sequel finds us. But not just writing, images and photos too. Why would you even need a fashion photographer when AI could ‘create’ an entire photoshoot?
Andy, initially hired to write a mea culpa for Runway and the sweatshop scandal, finds herself logging piece after piece that get little to no traction, with Miranda breathing down her neck for something, anything that pops. Cornered, Andy blurts out that she’s working on a profile of Miranda’s most sought after interview, Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu), the philanthropic (this comes in handy later) ex-wife of Justin Theroux’s multi-billionaire Benji Barnes. Andy doesn’t have so much as a contact for Sasha but her intrepid and investigative nature comes in handy when she spots a painting in Barnes’ house from a magazine that gives her now gallery-owning friend Lily (the returning Tracie Thoms) a lead, and after 18 calls and voicemails, Andy finally lands the big fish and feather in her cap. Liu and Theroux here are modeled heavily on Mackenzie Scott and Jeff Bezos, whose split has seen her donate tens of billions of her net worth to charity. Liu is wonderful in her far too minimal screen time but she serves a specific purpose here. Theroux also gets a hefty dose of Elon Musk, a former fatty with a deeply receding hairline, dumb as a post and with a laugh that curls the skin; he’s a riot. In one of the film’s funniest moments, he talks of wanting to build a rocket to the sun and calling it Icarus. In another, and a much more cogent and ruthless one (in front of The Last Supper in Milan, no less) Benji posits at one point, at not just the inevitability of AI but the gleeful desire to dive headlong into it, calling it an “overflow of lava” that will wipe out everything just like the fall of Pompeii, which sends Miranda quietly spiraling out into the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.
Andy finds time for a meet-cute romance with a contractor (Patrick Brammell) who refurbishes century-old buildings with soulless interiors, a metaphor that is not subtly used here, among others. But, at least he’s more receptive to Andy’s work, which provides us with a deliciously good dig at Adrien Grenier’s Nate from the first film. It feels unnecessary and shoe-horned in, a bit too ‘can she really have it all?’ but relationships, and the status of them, are all a part of our trio of returning women, with Miranda probably having the most stable of them all with new addition Kenneth Branagh, a performer in a string quartet, who grounds her.
The sequel brings in several returning players behind the scenes that keep it both fresh and reminiscent of the original with director David Frankel, cinematographer Florian Ballhaus (I can happily report that the dullness of the trailers is mysteriously not in the final product), composer Theodore Shapiro (who mixes familiar bouncy beats with James Bond-style espionage pieces) and production designer Jess Gonchor, who builds out not just Runway the magazine but a Milan runway that is gag(a)-worthy. Most noticeably missing is costume designer Patricia Field (who hasn’t been a full time costume designer since 2019 and now only consults), but in her place is Molly Rogers, who’s been working side by side with Field for more than two decades, including on the first film. Rogers bathes the sequel in Armani Prive, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Gabriela Hearst, a Dries Van Noten tassel jacket to die for and more. Even the cerulean sweater makes a bit of a re-emergence, but updated and chic.
Cameos are abound once again here, most notably Lady Gaga as herself and performing one of her three original songs for the film. We also get the return of Madonna’s “Vogue,” put to even better use here than in the first film. Miranda’s twins, Cassidy and Caroline, are here in a ‘blink and you’ll miss them’ millisecond of a shot; I guess the appeal of new material from J.K. Rowling is probably at an all-time low. “That’s all” makes a meaner comeback as well but Streep gets what’s probably Miranda’s cruelest line with “You’re not a visionary, you’re a vendor,” a sentiment that cuts deep and made me think of Mariah Carey’s “I’m a press conference, you’re a conversation” from her hit “Obsessed.”
Not everything here works though; a side plot involving Andy being commissioned to write a tell all book on Miranda looms, heralding in the literal creation of the story that bears the film’s very name is a bit too on the nose, and a very late in the film reconciliation feels unearned. But these are small grievances. After all, am I reaching for the stars here?
A lot has happened for the main cast of actors since 2006. Hathaway won an Oscar and her vibrant star has burst wide open, leaving behind the days of self-doubt and living in a place of confidence that drives her work and personality, she is incredible here. Streep won a third Oscar and remains one of our most resilient performers and is clearly relishing her return to Miranda. Blunt was nominated for her first and is set for a Spielberg summer blockbuster and embraces Emily’s nastier tendencies with aplomb. As viewers, we bring to a film not only what we know of these characters and how much we love or hate or love to hate them, but also who they are in the pantheon of cinema. I don’t know if this means there needs to be a threequel in this series but this trio will always be in dépêche mode.
Grade: B+
20th Century Studios will release The Devil Wears Prada 2 only in theaters on May 1.
He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.
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‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Review: The Long-Awaited Sequel Proves That Fashion is Always in Vogue [B+] 
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