The Devil Wears Prada 2
Director: David Frankel
Cert: PG
Starring: Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, Justin Theroux, Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci
Running Time: 1 hr 59 mins
“Stockholm called. They want their syndrome back.”
So says someone about two-thirds of the way into this pleasant enough sequel to one of most-quoted motion pictures of the 2000s. The suggestion is that too many characters have become too tolerant of Miranda Priestly while working in seductive proximity to the legendarily abrasive magazine editor.
The same accusation could be levelled at the film itself. Played, in the first episode, with famous passive aggression by Meryl Streep, Miranda doesn’t become any sort of pussycat here. But, as the world becomes hostile around her, you sense her erstwhile victims giving into something like pity.
This is perhaps a symptom of the form. Bearing only fleeting similarities to Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns, Lauren Weisberger’s 2013 sequel to her own novel, the new film is an extended, kindly, good-looking exercise in fan service.
That’s to say it gives the enthusiasts what they think they want. The four key characters are united. Lovely clothes are worn. Savage quips are unleashed. We get so many lashings of Miranda that it proves impossible to remain hostile. There is barely a story. There is not much forward momentum. But, as is often the case with fan service, The Devil Wears Prada 2 offers an agreeable place in which to spend two undemanding hours.
First things first. Get the team back together. We begin with Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) losing her media job – the film has much to say about digital gutting of the industry – on the very day she wins a prestigious award. After a few minutes of blubbing, the script propels her into the role of features editor of Runway magazine.
Miranda, still its editor-in-chief, seems to barely recognise her former assistant. Nigel Kipling, the magazine’s art director, maintains the charming aloofness that only Stanley Tucci can master. Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), also a former assistant to Miranda, is now at Dior, but, following various business shenanigans, she ends up closer to the Runway constellation.
At its best, The Devil Wears Prada 2 engages saltily with the social and economic changes that have set in since the 2006 original. One yearns for a little more of Miranda’s amusingly half-hearted attempts to accommodate woke restrictions on her acidic put-downs.
“You can’t say that!”
“What? ‘Methadone’ or ‘New Jersey’?” she says after a barb involving both.
The new requirement for the magazine to generate clicks feels on the money. The increasing adjacency of a Muskalike figure is pitched as a properly alarming prospect, but it is hard for the film to take the highest of roads while accommodating conspicuous placement for a leading coffee chain (one I suspect Miranda long ago ceased being seen dead near).
None of this gets in the way of servicing the customers. Those devotees will, reasonably enough, savour the elaborate montages as the gang descends on dreamy Milan. The end credits feature an enormous list of celebrity cameos, the oddest of which is surely from a celebrated Co Down golfer. Is our Rory McIlroy really an idol of that many Prada addicts?
For all those elaborately simple pleasures, it does feel as if much air has left the balloon. So keen are they on humanising Miranda that they have drafted in Kenneth Branagh – he seems to be playing a violinist – as barely ambulatory love interest. By the close she has been sufficiently defanged to barely register as antagonist.
It ends, for the rest of the characters, as many fans would surely like it to end. That does provide a soothing evening in the dark, but one feels this may be one of those so-so sequels that, a few years after it has progressed to streaming, seems to have scarcely ever existed.
In cinemas from Friday, May 1st