↓↑journey

By Chris Ranta

As another week goes by, so does the arrival of yet another decades-belated legacy sequel driving asses into seats in the (brand) name of mostly cheap nostalgia and reverence for a time when major releases weren’t nearly as soulless and vapid as they are today.

What used to be a trick that dazzled the masses — that is, hack executives digging up IP corpses of the past and reanimating them for the world to see — is now losing its lustre every passing calendar year. To think this is the only way you can get some of Hollywood’s best performers to share the screen in this day and age. As Adam Sandler once sang (screamed) in The Wedding Singer (which will probably get a sequel dumped onto Netflix in the next five years), “Somebody kill me please.”

This is something director David Frankel and writer Aline Brosh McKenna were clearly conscious of as they make their return, along with the core cast of Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and God’s gift to my Instagram feed: Stanley Tucci (who are all great as expected), to what I am now unfortunately dubbing the Devil Wears Prada franchise.

Not only are they striving for something closer resembling a “real movie,” but there is an air of self-awareness as its commentary on the current state of journalism (see: Hell) parallels the deeply cynical reasons why Disney thought to greenlight this in the first place. It’s easy, it’s familiar, it’s something you can throw on in the background, just like the slop Runway has been churning out all these years since the last time we saw these characters. Everything is content, nothing is compelling, and that’s messed up, so it’s at least commendable to see Frankel and McKenna try their best to treat their audience like grown-ups in a landscape where the people are pandered to like infants. 

It may not nearly be as sharp as its predecessor as it opts for a more heavy-handed approach that makes the first one feel subtle by comparison, but it’s still easily the highlight of the film. Perhaps it can be seen as hypocritical, given that Frankel et al are preaching against the contentification of art, news, and… well, everything within the confines of a legacy sequel for one of the most artistically and morally bankrupt corporations imaginable.

However, I choose to be the optimist who sees this as a small swing in the right direction. At its best, it drives the film forward and comes from a a surprisingly passionate and sincere place. Most notably, Andy’s (Hathaway) scathing speech as she wins an award for her work seconds after being fired over text is one of the more biting moments on par with the best bits in the first film. Even when elements fall flat — including a couple slight but tired attempts to poke fun at PC work culture as we learn Miranda (Streep) has apparently been leashed by Runway’s HR — they leave the film faster than they came into it. 

It also lacks the focus of the first film as it stumbles in the same way something like 2024’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does (which also features Justin Theroux doing his best in a thankless role). The narrative plays out like a series of Devil Wears Prada sequel ideas that were tossed into a blender. Plot points are picked up about as quickly as they’re put down — most notably Runway’s massive, viral scandal (the film’s inciting incident), everything involving Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu) and Andy’s new romance with her landlord (Patrick Brammall) — are established and resolved within minutes at times.

Others, like Andy toying with the idea of writing an exposé book on Miranda as a favour for a friend, linger in small bursts throughout the film before being swiftly resolved minutes before the end credits roll. It’s not to say any of these are “bad ideas” in any way, but if they were in a film that gave them the room to breathe, they would thrive instead of flounder. 

At its best, it drives the film forward and comes from a a surprisingly passionate and sincere place.

Even still, fans are bound to get a lot from this, a movie that does its best to treat its audience like adults when almost everything else in the multiplex would rather talk down to them. It’s in this sense that it’s better than it has any right to be.

Is it unbelievably soul-crushing and miserable to evaluate a work of art like this? Absolutely and without hesitation, but even if our expectations were just a little bit higher, I would still say I had fun, even if I end up forgetting I saw it within a week. Even at its sloppiest, it never feels like you’re watching slop, but instead a cavalcade of ideas being thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Some of it lands, some of it doesn’t, but the stuff that does is more than solid. 

6/10