Like Tom Cruise grinning away in the cockpit in Top Gun: Maverick, Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly is back, exactly as you remember. In this champagne-crisp sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, the silvery terror is still editing Runway magazine, and remains a master of passive-aggression, with a pursed lip that can crush an intern at 30 paces.
But as Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs soon learns after being rehired as Runway’s features editor – having spent the intervening two decades as a serious journalist – the world has shifted around her old boss, and isn’t likely to shift back. The once-invincible Miranda now finds herself squeezed by advertisers, harangued by consultants, shushed by HR when, say, enunciating the words “body positive” as if they taste of iodine, and perturbed by the brash tech bros and hapless publishing scions from whom her waning editorial budget now comes.
Gloomy? Not even a bit. This is a glossy and sophisticated workplace comedy about the end of a gilded age of sophisticated froth – deftly written by Aline Brosh McKenna and fizzily directed by David Frankel, both returning from the first film. The question it poses is: now that both fashion and media are fast and disposable, do the slower, sturdier taste-makers and mechanisms of 20 years ago retain any relevance at all? The answer it comes up with is: despite their obvious (and often very funny) flaws, let’s hope so.
If Prada 2 makes you pine for the era of its 2006 forerunner, that may be partly because the film itself, with its acid wit and unabashed love of luxury and glamour, feels like the product of an earlier age. Like the first, the comic tone is both waspish and flattering to the viewer: equal parts George Cukor and Frasier Crane. When was the last time you saw a major studio movie with a joke whose punchline turns on regional variations in Italian cuisine?
Hathaway and Streep are at the respective peaks of their comedic powers. Every silly moment feels honest, from the way that Andy remains perky even when loitering, to Miranda’s awkward, single-thumbed smartphone scrolling technique (no digital native, she).
It’s a considerable pleasure, too, to reconnect with Emily Blunt’s ex-PA Emily, now a big noise at Dior, and Stanley Tucci’s Nigel, Miranda’s immaculately tailored consigliere – whose own career, by contrast, hasn’t moved on an inch. New characters are few and for the most part topical: Justin Theroux is a loaded yet uncultured Jeff Bezos-type; Lucy Liu is his ex-wife, ploughing her astronomical divorce settlement into pet causes. And Kenneth Branagh pops up as Miranda’s latest consort, all suave politesse and reassuring beard.
Does it all amount to much more than a millennial nostalgia bath? Perhaps not – and an avalanche of fashion-world cameos, from Lady Gaga to Donatella Versace, lend it an “officially endorsed” air that the original felt juicier without. Part of the genius of the earlier film was that it doubled as both send-up and celebration. This one skews towards the latter, and crosses its fingers that the party might have a few more years left in it yet.
12A cert, 119 mins. In UK cinemas from May 1