Midway through “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” as Runway magazine faces the latest of many challenges to its future integrity and potentially even existence as a publication, now-jaded journo Andy Sachs bemoans the corporate repackaging of so much media into a smaller, cheaper, more efficient and less valuable facsimile of itself. She’s too polite to say “enshittification” — the buzzword that the internet has lately applied to this trend, with particular regard to online platforms — but it hangs almost audibly in the air. That’s a gutsy idea to invoke in a sequel aiming to recapture the glories of a much-loved media property from 20 years ago.
The good news is that “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is not willfully enshittified. It’s a sequel made with intelligence and respect for both its predecessor and the legions who still love it, so much so that it functions less as a follow-up than as a kind of tribute act, albeit one featuring all the original talent — picking out the comic and dramatic highs from the first film and faithfully replaying them with the same moves and cadences. But it is, by almost any metric, a lesser movie: narratively, emotionally and cinematically flatter, buoyed by game performances that nonetheless steadfastly fail to surprise. And in almost every way that it falls short, it illustrates something that’s been taken from mainstream Hollywood moviemaking since 2006.
