‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Review: Meryl Streep And Anne Hathaway Reunite In A Reflective Sequel

LOS ANGELES, CA — Nearly two decades after “The Devil Wears Prada” crystallized a generational touchstone, its sequel, directed again by David Frankel, returns with a wisp of nostalgia — not as a stroll down memory lane, but as a warm meditation on relevance in a media culture recalibrated by the digital age.

The film can’t resist invoking the epilogue that closed the original — Andy Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway, catching the faint, private smile Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) offered from the backseat of her town car — a farewell staged as a détente between two women who understood the cost of ambition.

That moment becomes a hinge the sequel quietly presses, a reminder of a world where print still held cultural authority and where ambition felt like a silhouette taking shape rather than one endlessly re‑tailored.

If the original charted a brisk bildungsroman, an ascent of ambition propelled by rhythm, wit and the intoxicating velocity of proximity to power, this new chapter adopts a more contemplative posture. It's a shift that gives the film its muted charm even as it limits its bite. The Devil herself still wears Prada, and the Hermès scarves remain knotted with immaculate precision.

Runway is no longer the untouchable cultural monolith it once was, and the film acknowledges that shift with a gentler tone, using the magazine’s diminished authority as the backdrop for the protégé’s return to the Devil’s orbit. Rather than chasing the sharp, satirical edge of its predecessor, the sequel finds a more subdued appeal in watching its characters navigate a media landscape reshaped by new technologies — a world where reinvention is not optional but compulsory, and where relevance is negotiated moment by moment.

The sequel opens by puncturing Andy’s hard-won stability. Moments before accepting a career-defining award, she learns her investigative team has been laid off — herself included. The speech she delivers instead — sharp, unsentimental, aimed at the slow collapse of print journalism — ricochets across social media with the velocity of a flare, signaling both her disillusionment and her refusal to go quietly. Hathaway plays Andy with a steadier, steelier center — the ingénue long gone. Now she has a lived-in resolve that makes her uncertainty feel earned.

Miranda, meanwhile, faces a different kind of erosion. Runway’s authority cracks when the magazine inadvertently endorses a sweatshop-driven fast-fashion brand — a scandal erupting just as group chairman Irv Ravitz prepares to elevate her to global head of content. Around her, the machinery that once amplified her power has shifted; Amari Mari (Simone Ashley), her impeccably calibrated new first assistant, moves through Runway with a sleek, self-possessed efficiency that reflects a different era of power. Streep leans into micro gestures — a tightened jaw, a delayed blink — signaling a woman accustomed to control now sensing the faint drag of gravity.

Ravitz moves quickly: seeing Andy’s speech dominate the digital conversation, he hires her as Runway’s new features lead to help restore the magazine’s credibility. Miranda greets her with a cool pretense of not remembering her, but the dynamic shifts when Andy lands an interview with Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu), half of a recently split billionaire power couple and the exclusive that could slow, then ultimately halt, Runway’s fall from grace.

Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), once Miranda’s harried first assistant, and now a Dior power broker controlling the kind of ad budget Runway can no longer take for granted, returns not with nostalgia but with leverage — proof that the hierarchy she once clawed her way through now tilts, however slightly, in her direction. Blunt plays her with an icy precision, the onetime frantic junior now fully fluent in how power circulates — and how deftly she can redirect it.

And Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci), still Miranda’s top lieutenant, ever the steady north star, brings his hard-won pragmatism to a Runway that now exists entirely online — a brand still iconic, but undeniably diminished. Tucci plays him with a gentler, more reflective ease — the wit intact but tempered by years of watching the industry contort itself.

The sequel sprinkles in a handful of love affairs. Patrick Brammall plays Andy’s boyfriend, a property developer offering steadiness without much conviction. Kenneth Branagh appears as Miranda’s dutifully dull violinist husband, while Justin Theroux tears into Benjy, Sasha Barnes’ brash and extravagantly wealthy ex.

Frankel directs with the assurance of a filmmaker fluent in power dynamics, and the film’s most incisive moments lean on that instinct — the pauses, the glances, the choreography of authority. But Aline Brosh McKenna’s screenplay can’t always sustain that clarity. It wavers between legacy and reinvention, unsure whether to dismantle the world that made “Prada” iconic or luxuriate in its familiar contours. That tension gives the sequel its texture — a push-pull between past and present — but it also softens its edge. The film gestures toward change but retreats whenever those gestures threaten to undercut the nostalgia.

In the end, what lingers is not spectacle or star power but the sense of a film unsure whether to interrogate its legacy or simply polish it. For a film preoccupied with relevance, its reluctance to fully confront that legacy feels less like failure than a kind of wistfulness — a story aware of how its legacy sits uneasily beside its present ambitions.

And yet, even as “The Devil Wears Prada” hesitates, the performances — especially from Streep, Hathaway, Blunt, and Tucci — retain a lived‑in ease, reminding us why this world resonated in the first place.