The Devil Wears Prada 2 was released in theaters on May 1, 20 years after the original. (Courtesy of IMDb)
Note: This review contains spoilers.
The long-awaited sequel to director David Frankel’s 2006 film “The Devil Wears Prada” tries to ask relevant questions about media culture in the digital age and where it fits in the business world of tech-bro financiers, but fails in execution.
Two decades after the events of the original film, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) faces an existential crisis even bigger than her icy rivalry with Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) — she needs to save journalism, or specifically, the fashion magazine Runway. Gone are the days of glossy fashion spreads and physical media; the world of fashion and modern media is a sad shell of what it used to be, with the rise of social media and decline of attention spans came the ideology of more for less.
Sachs herself is the victim of news staff gutting from the fictional “New York Vanguard” (despite winning a prestigious award for her investigative reporting with the paper!). She’s then offered a job as features editor at “Runway” to essentially PR-write the publication out of a sweatshop endorsement crisis after a clip of her award speech goes viral.
“Prada 2” asks relevant, pressing questions about the future of real, tangible media, but lacks the substance to answer them. The field of journalism is in a crisis, with the proliferation of AI-slop and dwindling attention spans (who reads print anymore?), but the film doesn’t do much except point out a well-accepted fact.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that sequels are rarely as good as the original. There was no way for “Prada 2″ to capture the iconic early-2000s Manhattan feel of the first movie, so the film plays every nostalgia card possible. There’s the return of fan-favorite Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci), who finally gets his chance to shine, and the iconic Vogue fashion montage, which Hathaway reportedly insisted not be cut.
The film relies on the first film’s majesty; it doesn’t have the same timelessness. It tries hard not to be a repeat of the original, but can’t stand on its own merit. It turns instead to spectacle and, with random (but fun) celebrity cameos — Jon Batiste and Amelia Dimoldenberg casually at Miranda’s house in the Hamptons — and a star-studded Milan Fashion Week featuring a Lady Gaga performance and dinner in front of Leonardo DaVinci’s “The Last Supper.” At times, the sequel plays too much into the iconicity of the original, which explains the barrage of not-so-subtle product placements scattered throughout the film. For instance, the multiple unopened and meticulously placed boxes of Maldon Sea Salt in Andy’s friend’s apartment and Diet Coke cans galore in hand, or the Runway cafeteria.
There’s an obliviously malicious tech-bro Bezos-like billionaire (Justin Theroux) whose potential hostile takeover of Runway for his girlfriend (and assistant to Priestley in the first film) Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt) is a looming threat at the end of the film, but no worries, the magazine is saved by his charitable ex-wife (Lucy Liu).
Overall, it’s clear the film was made for fans of the first film, not to give any grander or new meaningful takeaway. It’s nostalgic but shallow, lacking any real substance beyond an homage to the original.
6/10
