This review contains spoilers.
The first time I watched “The Devil Wears Prada,” I was a first-year at Northwestern and a new Daily staffer spinning out over my work-life balance and future plans. I expected a fun film filled with snappy dialogue, flashy outfits and a coming-of-age story about a young woman trying to keep her sanity in an unforgiving industry.
I didn’t expect the protagonist, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), to be a Medill alum — let alone The Daily’s former editor in chief. I also didn’t expect the movie to hit so close to home beyond that connection.
For all its corny lines and seemingly contradictory plot points, “The Devil Wears Prada” remains one of my favorite movies because it doesn’t clearly differentiate the angels from the devils. In one standout moment, Andy’s boss, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), demands Andy book her a flight home mid-hurricane and dismisses her as a “smart, fat girl” after she fails. But in a later scene, Miranda is devoid of makeup as she opens up to Andy about her regrets tied to an impending divorce.
It’s those moments of vulnerability — recognizing the cost of fame, questioning whether we should lose ourselves to ambitious goals — that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” lacks.
Released Friday, the long-awaited sequel does keep the original’s writer, director and lead actors, all of whom carry over the first film’s brisk pace and pithy one-liners. The obligatory callbacks mix with new side characters, more glamorous outfits, and always-welcome needle drops from Lady Gaga and other pop artists. The fantasy still feels fun and a little fresh — anchored by a plot that’s somehow both more mature and more simplistic than that of the first film.
Andy returns to her initial job at Runway magazine after getting laid off from her previous paper and proclaiming “journalism still f–king matters” in a scene created by people who have never actually been journalists. Her former colleague, Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), chases the money in her career as a Dior executive. Miranda pushes for stories that generate clicks online over hard-hitting investigations, and after a few too many HR complaints, Miranda must hang up her own coat instead of throwing it onto her assistant’s desk.
In a sequence that repeatedly made me burst into laughter, Miranda learns the office building has a cafeteria when a finance bro asks to meet her there for lunch. Her outfit contains pasteled frills and adornments. He’s just wearing a blue quarter-zip and vest. Imagine how boring his closet must be, and imagine how Miranda felt listening to him and his suited-up consultants — or, as Andy called them, “undertakers” — try to cut up Runway.
“The Devil Wears Prada 2” shines when it sets up this battle between old and new media, with Andy and Miranda on one side and people like Emily and her AI-loving billionaire boyfriend, Benji Barnes (Justin Theroux), on the other. But the film’s Hollywood happy ending, complete with an unnecessary romance and an unearned friendship, feels more rushed and less cathartic than its predecessor’s.
That, perhaps, is the consequence of Andy strutting back to Runway. I admired her persistence in the face of seemingly impossible demands throughout much of the first film, and I smiled when she defied Miranda, threw her work phone into a Paris fountain and finally landed her dream job.
In that sense, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” asks what happens when your dream falls apart. In an alternate universe, Andy’s return to Runway is a cautionary tale about succumbing to the devil. Instead, it becomes the new dream.
To the credit of the cast and crew, that fantasy feels quite alluring, and I’ll relive it whenever I play this movie on an airplane or at a party. Miranda seems to recognize my predicament when she looks up at Jesus in Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” and says that his lack of an angelic halo symbolizes how we’re all both “glorious” and “fallible.”
Like Andy, we’re returning to the familiar. I wish the film had grappled more with Miranda’s idea, but perhaps she’s right in another way. How glorious it is to be back. How fallible we are to go back.
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Bluesky: @edwardsimoncruz.bsky.social
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