“Like Tom Cruise grinning away in the cockpit in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly is back, exactly as you remember,” said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. In this “champagne-crisp” sequel to “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006), the “silvery terror” (Streep) is still editing Runway magazine with a “pursed lip that can crush an intern at 30 paces”, and dismissing her assistants with the dread words: “That’s all.”
But the world she inhabits has shifted. Miranda’s one-time assistant Andy (Anne Hathaway) has just lost her own job as an award-winning reporter, owing to cutbacks in the print media, and is rehired by Runway to help it cope with the fallout from a sweatshop scandal. There, she finds the once seemingly “invincible” Miranda struggling with the squeeze on advertising revenue in the digital age, bowing reluctantly to modern sensibilities on issues such as “body positivity”, and having to kowtow to “brash tech bros” for funding.
As Miranda navigates these “choppy seas”, Streep lets us glimpse a little more of the character’s “psyche without losing that magnetic elusiveness”, said Beth Webb in Empire. And there are some funny moments along the way, such as a scene in which Miranda tries to hang up her coat, having been told to stop throwing it at her assistants. But while the future of print journalism feels a topic worthy of exploration, the drama is “rather frictionless”.
The first film thrived on the dynamic between Miranda and Andy; here we’re supposed to fear B.J. Novak’s fashion-illiterate “Silicon Valley scion” and Justin Theroux’s Bezos-like billionaire, though both are “forgettable”. The sequel is also let down by Andy’s “dreary” romance with a real-estate magnate (Patrick Brammall), said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Still, this is “good-natured” entertainment, and it is a pleasure to be reunited with Miranda’s former senior assistant Emily (Emily Blunt), who is now a hotshot at Dior, and the ever-loyal Nigel (Stanley Tucci). The film even allows another appearance by Andy’s cerulean-blue polyblend sweater.
The first film was made by Streep’s performance, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. And she is terrific here too; but it’s a pity that the characters haven’t really developed over the years: Miranda is still icy, Emily scornful, and Andy high-minded. There are good lines (“Look what TJ Maxx dragged in,” says Nigel when he sees Andy), but the script is not laden with zingers, and the whole thing is more sentimental, and less satirical. In short, it is just not as good as the original.