‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ review: Fair Vanity

In The Devil Wears Prada 2, the long-awaited sequel reunites its iconic cast to tell a sad, glossy story about losing the things you love.

There is a version of The Devil Wears Prada 2 that fully commits to being a tragedy. It would be about Meryl Streep‘s iconic Miranda Priestly presiding over the slow institutional death of everything she sacrificed her humanity to build. It would be about Anne Hathaway‘s Andy Sachs realizing that the life she chose instead wasn’t a safe harbor, but just a different kind of precarity. And it would let the melancholy it keeps gesturing toward finally land. That version would be, at minimum, an interesting sequel.

The version that actually exists — glossy, competent, emotionally satisfying in small doses and meandering by the end — keeps reaching for that movie and then retreating into fan service before anything too uncomfortable can settle. What you get is a film that understands its themes more clearly than it executes them. That knows what it wants to say about journalism and legacy and institutional collapse but surrounds those ideas with enough wardrobe montages and quotable callbacks to keep the anxiety at arm’s length.

This is not necessarily a failure on the film’s own terms. But it does make The Devil Wears Prada 2 a strange and slightly bittersweet experience. A movie about loss that declines to feel the loss.

Back on the Runway.

Hathaway returns as Andy, now an award-winning journalist who has seen countries the size of whole continents. Sadly, she’s been laid off thanks to the industry’s ongoing collapse, but she quickly gets pulled back into Runway‘s orbit — this time as Features Editor — just as the magazine implodes under scandal and the weight of irrelevance. Miranda, for her part, is still magnificent and still terrifying. But she’s also stuck in a “softer” world that makes her place in it all the more precarious. The irony is as severe as her quips.

The film’s best scenes are the ones where it allows the sadness to be sadness. The media industry backdrop — Runway struggling against digital erosion, billionaires circling, clickbait replacing editorial instinct — gives The Devil Wears Prada 2 more substance than its marketing promised.

At times, it’s suprisingly documentary-like in its assessment of the media landscape. After all, there’s real weight in watching these characters navigate a world where the thing Miranda spent her life building has become a rescue project. Where the question isn’t how to be excellent but whether excellence is still a viable, human-driven currency.

Our loins are far from girded.

But the film keeps undercutting this by making the antagonist forces so cartoonishly legible. We meet awful billionaires, stupid internet content strategies, the usual on-the-nose shorthand for cultural decline. The critique never quite becomes critique so much as backdrop.

It’s about media consolidation, yes, but it’s also a product of media consolidation, released by 20th Century Studios, a division of the Walt Disney Corporation, into theaters alongside a marketing campaign that includes branded Starbucks drinks and Tweezerman nail clippers.

The film doesn’t seem to notice this dissonance. Hey, maybe it doesn’t need to. But its thematic ambitions keep bumping against its commercial reflexes, and the commercial reflexes ultimately win out. Still, at least the script finds something to hang its chic hat on. And this is certainly the rare sequel that does somewhat earn its existence, mainly due to the original’s text allowing room for later introspection for these characters.

The comedy problem.

The original Devil Wears Prada is, among other things, legitimately funny. Sharply, deftly, cruelly funny. The sequel is surprisingly not. The wit is there in individual lines, and Emily Blunt, liberated and fully unfiltered as Emily Charlton, generates real heat. But the humor that saturated the first film — the effervescent comedy of watching someone be absolutely annihilated by a system that treats human needs as inefficiencies — has been replaced by something warmer and blunter. Miranda is softer. The machine is less ruthless. The edges have been sanded.

What works, often, is the cast. Stanley Tucci, blessed with deservedly more screen time this go-around, does extraordinary things with it. His Nigel has always been the original’s secret weapon and moral register. He’s the person who gave everything to this world and made a separate peace with what it cost him. So watching him navigate the sequel’s complications gives the film its most winning, even moving moments.

Hathaway herself is slightly hamstrung by a screenplay that keeps having Andy function as responsive observer rather than agent. She’s still a little stammery despite everything she’s supposedly become in 20 years. The film wants her to be a woman of professional confidence who is nonetheless destabilized by returning to Runway, which is coherent. But it sometimes it tips into regression for its own sake, down to a tacked-on love interest that adds virtually nothing except extra runtime.

The bottom line.

The ending meanders in ways that suggest the script was trying to honor too many character arcs at once and gave equal time to all of them rather than making a choice. By the film’s close, you’ve received emotional resolution but not quite dramatic resolution. Which is, perhaps, exactly right for a movie about institutions that don’t really end so much as slowly lose their shape.

Which is probably why the end does feel so baffling. For all its cynicism and echoing of the original’s bittersweet fountain ending, the sequel deliriously treads its own water. It waves its arms out in surrender, essentially begging the audience to feel good about something, anything, after all we’ve endured. Also, how do you cast Caleb Hearon and not let him tell any jokes?

Anyway, for that reason and plenty more, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is not the light, frothy thing the original was. It’s a sadder, grayer film wearing beautiful clothes, which is either a metaphor or just an honest description. Either way, the clothes themselves are great to look at.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens in theaters May 1. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of 20th Century Studios. Read more articles by Jon Negroni here.