This review contains spiders from the movie. If you do not wish to read them, I would suggest you click off.
Right, so I’ve just finished watching the new Devil Wears Prada sequel, and to be honest with you, it’s a standard 3 out of 5 for me. Don’t get me wrong, it looks great, and the acting is decent, but the rushed writing really lets it down.
The biggest issue is that they’ve tried to cram far too much into the runtime. You’ve got Erv—the man who originally hired Andy—having a sudden heart attack, and then his son slides in out of nowhere. One minute he’s there, and the next he’s drastically cutting expenses and trying to downsize the whole brand. It was so sudden it gave me whiplash! That whole storyline, along with the massive high-stakes plot to get outside help and buy the company back, could have easily been another hour or two of movie, on its own, to actually let them breathe.
Instead of all that forced corporate drama, they missed a massive trick by not making the modern digital landscape the central focus. I wanted to see how Andy, after 20 years away, uses the actual skills she’s gathered to navigate today’s brutal online world. They could have done a brilliant, much deeper story about modern cancel culture—how easily people get cancelled nowadays and how the team fights back against a massive public relations controversy.
What Went Wrong with the Characters?
The Big Twist Felt Cheap: Emily’s sudden turn at the end just felt dropped in for shock value. We’re led to believe it’s a lovely “old friends and enemies coming together” moment to stop the buyout, and then bam—her real intentions are revealed, and she explains her whole life away in under two minutes. There was zero build-up for that strain in the relationship.
Nigel Deserved Better:
They should have given Nigel Stanley Tucci way more time to grow. It would have been a far richer story if we had seen Miranda actually leaning on him and treating him like a proper partner, rather than just a sounding board. Plus, having a proper cyclical moment where they really play into the fact that he was the one behind hiring Andy in the first place would have given the film a lovely emotional core.
Miranda the Mind Reader:
By the end, Miranda acts like she sussed the whole thing out from the start, saying she knew it would happen. But because there’s absolutely no backstory or depth provided to bridge the twenty-year gap between the movies, it just feels totally contrived. We, as the viewers, are left completely in the dark.
The Verdict
It’s a pity, because the potential for a really deep, sharp movie was absolutely there. If they had focused on the team dynamics and the modern media landscape, and left Erv’s son’s arrival to downsize as a cliffhanger at the very end, it would have perfectly set up The Devil Wears Prada 3. As it stands, it’s just far too rushed to be anything more than average.
Rating: 3/5
Also, not sure how I’m going to do more reviews on my blog or on letterboxd regardless, I will paste like here https://boxd.it/lgAxx
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