Twenty years after Andy Sachs walked away from Miranda Priestly, she returns to Runway and discovers that the magazine is now fighting for the privilege of surviving.
The fashion remains expensive. The offices remain intimidating. Miranda still has the ability to turn a room silent without raising her voice. What has changed is the source of power. Print circulation is collapsing, advertising has migrated, influencers can create or destroy a trend before an issue reaches a newsstand, and prestige no longer guarantees money.
Aline Brosh McKenna's screenplay brings Andy back after her serious journalism career suffers another blow. She enters Runway older, more accomplished, and less easily impressed, but the magazine still understands something about her ambition that she would prefer to believe she left behind.
Anne Hathaway plays that contradiction well. Andy is no longer the uncertain assistant changing shoes in an office bathroom. She can challenge Miranda directly and recognize manipulation before it reaches her. Hathaway also preserves the part of Andy that enjoys being needed by powerful people, especially when the work appears important enough to justify the compromise.
Meryl Streep returns to Miranda without turning the performance into an impersonation of its most quoted moments. The voice is still low, the timing still exact, and the smallest look can dismiss an entire presentation. Streep's new work is in Miranda's awareness that the world has changed around her. She will not admit fear, but she has begun noticing which doors no longer open automatically.
Emily Blunt nearly steals the film as Emily Charlton, now a powerful figure in luxury fashion whose company possesses the funding Runway desperately needs. The reversal is obvious and satisfying. Emily once survived Miranda's office by anticipating humiliation. Now she can make Miranda wait.
Blunt plays success as something Emily wears more comfortably than kindness. She is sharper, wealthier, and very funny, but the performance also suggests that the old injuries have not disappeared. Power has simply given her the opportunity to decide who absorbs them next.
The sequel is funniest when Emily realizes she can finally make Miranda ask for something.
Stanley Tucci remains essential as Nigel. He understands Miranda's language, Andy's compromises, and Emily's resentment before any of them says what is happening. Tucci gives the sequel its most grounded presence, though the screenplay frequently uses Nigel as the person who explains the emotional meaning of a scene the actors have already made clear.
The new characters receive less satisfying treatment. Simone Ashley's Amari represents a generation unwilling to accept Runway's old hierarchy as the natural order of fashion. Lucy Liu brings authority to Sasha Barnes, a media figure whose influence becomes increasingly important. Both characters introduce ideas about ownership, representation, and institutional change that the film raises more effectively than it explores.
The romantic subplot is the clearest example of the sequel losing focus. Andy's relationship with a wealthy new figure gives Hathaway someone outside Runway to argue with, but the material feels designed to recreate the conflict between ambition and intimacy rather than discover what that conflict looks like for her now.
David Frankel directs with the same crowd-pleasing efficiency as the original. New York and Milan provide movement, entrances are timed for applause, and the film knows when a returning costume or line will trigger recognition. The clothes remain pleasurable to watch, though the flatter digital photography makes some of the fashion look less textured than it should.
That visual smoothness reflects the larger problem. The Devil Wears Prada was glossy, but its surfaces concealed a sharp workplace movie about labor, class, taste, and the stories people tell themselves while becoming someone they once disliked. The sequel repeatedly gestures toward equally rich material, especially the collapse of magazines and fashion's dependence on digital attention, then retreats into reunion comedy.
Its satire is most effective when it becomes specific. A meeting about engagement data, brand partnerships, and editorial independence reveals how little of Runway's crisis can be solved by taste alone. Miranda can identify the right dress instantly. She cannot force an audience to pay for the authority that judgment once created.
The film should stay there. Instead, it adds corporate maneuvers, romantic complications, celebrity appearances, and callbacks to nearly every beloved beat from the original. Some are genuinely funny. Others stop the movie so the audience can recognize what has returned.
Streep, Hathaway, Blunt, and Tucci remain too good for the sequel to become empty nostalgia. They make the shared history feel real, particularly in the moments when Andy and Miranda recognize that they are no longer reenacting the same mentor and assistant relationship. There is affection between these characters, but no innocence.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is at its best when it admits that institutions and people can outlive the era that gave them power without knowing what they are supposed to become next. Runway's crisis is not simply that the internet changed fashion. It is that fashion changed while Runway was still congratulating itself for predicting the change.
The movie understands that idea. It just does not trust it enough to risk making the reunion uncomfortable.
