I only saw The Devil Wears Prada once, in theaters during its original theatrical run. I didn’t care too much for it at the time. I was a teenager who was working two jobs while going to college, struggling financially and at the peak of my indie pretension, and I found the film to be both too mainstream and too propagandistic to really be enjoyable. This was still two years before the 2008 financial crisis hit, a cultural disruption that changed a lot about the way that people engaged with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Hit reality series like MTV Cribs and My Super Sweet 16, which trafficked in both envy of the wealthy and derision for their excesses, were both quietly scuttled by 2010 (although new seasons went into production for both in 2021 and 2016, respectively). At nineteen, I was already struggling too hard in my own life to find the world of couture fashion to be escapist fantasy. When Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) gives her memetic “cerulean sweater” dressing down to Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) about how she sees herself as being outside of, uninfluenced by, and dismissively “above” the world of fashion, she may as well have been speaking directly to me. I, admittedly immaturely, saw the 2006 film as a movie about a woman with high career aspirations who is brainwashed into giving an industry that is predicated on wealthy elitism a pass. Further, I was still impressionable enough that the film’s rampant body-shaming was both distasteful and had a negative lasting impact on me personally. (Also, I just hate KT Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See.”)

In the years since, the original film’s finer moments have become Mean Girls-scale internet background radiation in the form of Miranda Priestly girlboss gifsets, “Are you wearing the?”/”The [x]? Yes I am” memes, and “Adrian Grenier is the real villain” thinkpieces. The Devil Wears Prada is a film that’s, if you’ll excuse the pun, tailor-made to be chopped into pieces for fancams of Miranda Priestly, and the predominance of vertical/portrait video means that we perpetual scrollers never have to miss whatever outfit she’s wearing at the time. The less memorable elements, like the fact that Andy’s in a love triangle between Entourage, and The Mentalist, aren’t what people think about when the film’s title comes up in conversation or online. Now, twenty years later, we’re back with another entry in what Brandon likes to call the “should have been a Super Bowl commercial” genre, a legacy sequel that for most people will simply be a nice nostalgic ride but for others will be a piece of art that is forever responsible for justifying its existence. I was surprisingly on board for Freakier Friday, so why not? 

On the same night that Miranda Priestly is hosting the similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from (henceforth STBLDF) Met Gala, Andy Sachs is present at a journalistic awards ceremony. Andy  and her entire team from the New York Vanguard are laid off via text message in the same moment that her win is announced, and she ascends the dais to express both her gratitude and her frustration at the ongoing one-percenter-led gutting of journalism as both a career and a necessary pillar that supports a theoretically free society. Miranda also finds herself in crisis mode when the reputation of Runway, the STBLDF-Vogue that she oversees, is endangered by an exposé that shows the magazine’s negligence in regards to an article about a supposed ethical manufacturer that secretly runs sweatshops. The CEO of STBLDF-Condé Nast puts his plans to move Miranda into a global editorial role on hold and hires Miranda as the new Features editor at Runway, which brings Miranda and Andy back together again. The latter is also reunited with Nigel (Stanley Tucci), still serving as Miranda’s right hand, and Emily (Emily Blunt), who has moved out of publishing and into luxury retail with Dior, which makes up a healthy chunk of Runway’s advertising and thus gives her the chance to play hardball with Miranda following the “fast fash”(ion) debacle. 

The set-up here is pretty solid. Even though Miranda still reigns over her office like she did decades previously, changes in expectations about workplace behavior mean that she doesn’t have the liberty to throw her coats at her assistants as she once did, and her current assistant Amari (Simone Ashley)’s job seems to entail no small amount of reining in Miranda’s déclassé sentiments about body positivity and trivial references to killing herself. Although she still commands respect, it’s only a matter of time before the elderly STBLDF-Condé Nast CEO hands the reins over to his mouth-breathing, athleisure-sporting, wannabe-disruptor idiot son (BJ Novak). The film also gets in on 2025’s general abuse of STBLDF-Elon Musk archetypes, with a little bit of Bill Gates thrown in for good measure. Justin Theroux plays Benji Barnes, a tech billionaire who’s unbelievably unfunny and out of touch, who, instead of aspiring to colonize Mars, instead wants to look into the potential of exploring the sun. Lucy Liu plays Sasha, his Melinda Gates-esque ex-wife, who supported him initially while he “tinkered around with code,” and is now unconscionably wealthy and hopes to give away her entire fortune before her death. When Andy’s dogged persistence nets her an interview with the infamously reclusive Sasha, one that results in an exclusive on the announcement of her new engagement, it solidifies her value to Runway, but their attempts to save the magazine (and, by extension, journalism as a whole) may all be in vain. 

The Devil Wears Prada 2 smartly decides to be about something, in a way that actually justifies going back to this well twenty years later. This is a film about the death of journalism, and it manages to be smartly trenchant for a lot of its runtime before fizzling a bit with an ending that’s both too pat and too happy while also kind of missing the point of this entire enterprise. When Andy returns to Runway, Nigel is candid with her about the publication’s deteriorating state, citing that features which would once have been budgeted as a month long international trip now only cover a couple of afternoons at a nearby studio. The magazine chugs along, but the physical copies that appear in newsstands have been whittled down to the point that Nigel jokes it could be used as dental floss. The changing social media landscape means that Andy’s writing isn’t connecting with an audience; her features are incisive and informative, but no one seems to actually be clicking through and reading them. Even something that Andy once dismissed as utterly frivolous is now another barometer for the end of the Fourth Estate as a whole, an old world dying while a new one struggles to be born. 

The film manifests the discussion of the death of culture and whatever is to follow it in the world to come in the form of Andy’s token love interest, Peter (Patrick Brammall), a contractor who has recently converted a classic New York architectural beauty into apartments painted millennial grey and furnished with faux-MCM Wayfair purchases. Peter makes the argument that, if he hadn’t done so, the building would have been torn down completely and something modern would have been built in its place, and in some way he’s managing to hold onto the old form while making it into something new. It’s a little on-the-nose as a metaphor, and the film wobbles on whether he’s right or not. He’s pretty thinly characterized, overall, and seems to exist solely to fulfill the need for a romance that the film wouldn’t suffer for lacking if it were excised. Ultimately, the film comes down to a message of “it’s okay if a billionaire owns a media monopoly, as long as it’s the right billionaire, preferably a girlboss who leans in.” I could see that this was where the film was going as it headed into the final act, but I was still a little shocked that this was where all of the rigmarole about integrity and personal growth led us. At the end of the day, this film is still a corporate product that is being seen at for-profit megaplexes, and it was never going to be able to imagine a conclusion where all of this was resolved by anything other than appealing to someone with deeper pockets. This is a film about fashion as journalism, but one of the key differences between those things is that journalism, despite often being driven by capital, is not inherently so, and as such it’s difficult to imagine any solution to the characters’ problems that isn’t the one that the screenwriters came up with. That’s not my job, though; it was theirs. 

I’m coming down pretty hard on a movie that I mostly enjoyed. I appreciated that Hathaway’s love interest was played by an actor who was handsome in a very normal way, not someone with a chiseled jawline and perfect facial symmetry, but I also found my mind wandering the most during their romantic scenes. They feel rather rote, all things considered, and at two hours, the comedy isn’t quite sufficient to really carry the film all the way to the finish line. It gets sentimental but never goes maudlin, and I was sufficiently invested for the entire runtime. It’s worth noting that every single trailer before this one was advertising a legacy sequel: the new Scary Movie, Focker-in-Law, Practical Magic 2, the live-action Moana, and, of course, the omnipresent Mandalorian and Grogu. (There was also a DWP2-themed Loreal ad with Kiran Soni and the Pepsi copaganda Jenner.) With that as an appetizer, I was primed and ready for a narrative about the death of commercial art and the strangling weed of capitalism. Other than DWP2 itself, none of these films feel like they were made with any artistic intent, or with a particular story to tell that justifies its existence the way that DWP2 does, with the possible exception of Scary Movie, a parody franchise which has lain fallow for long enough that there’s a wealth of new material for it to satirize. What all of these titles offer is the chance to take a second walk through a familiar world, and DWP2 succeeds with this in a way that doesn’t feel like it exists solely as a corporate product. It’s funny, if not quite funny enough, and it’s a little broader in its comedy than its predecessor, but it’s worth a watch. It falls short of being as worthwhile as Creed, Doctor Sleep, or Freakier Friday, but it doesn’t deserve to be sorted into the same dustbin as The Craft: Legacy and Hocus Pocus 2. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond