In Review: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2,’ ‘Deep Water’

The Devil Wears Prada 2
Dir. David Frankel
119 min. 

The Devil Wears Prada ended with Andrea “Andy” Sachs (Anne Hathaway), a Northwestern J-school graduate, wrapping up her cruel tutelage under fashion-mag icon Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) by winning a reporting job at an independent New York newspaper that’s more suited to her original ambitions. She even gets a half-recommendation from Miranda, who tells her prospective editors that Andy was the most disappointing assistant she ever had and they’d be “idiots” not to hire her. Twenty years ago, professional journalists might have snorted at Andy’s supposed good fortune in scoring a reporting gig and those same journalists might snort even louder at the opening of The Devil Wears Prada 2, where she’s collecting an award for her work. But here’s the twist: She and her colleagues lose their jobs via text message before she even reaches the dais. 

That’s the first of many positive signs that The Devil Wears Prada 2 has at least one foot solidly planted in the real world, which is a pleasant surprise for a legacy sequel about Andy’s return to the glitz and glamor of the fashion industry. For as much the film gives itself over to designer clothes and star-studded soirees in the Hamptons, the fantasy isn’t so blinkered as to ignore the sobering realities that have settled over once-imperious editors like Miranda, who must suffer a little belt-cinching along with everyone else. While the original filmmaking team, director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, revive the feisty tensions that made The Devil Wears Prada a good time, they deserve some credit for doing more than checking the requisite boxes. They’ve made a sequel in 2026 that doesn’t Rip Van Winkle the last two decades away. 

With most of the principal parties scattered to the winds at the end of the first film, Frankel and McKenna make quick work of bringing them back together under a much different set of circumstances. Though Miranda still occupies her perch as the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine, she’s not entirely in tune with the trends of the day and often turns to her latest first assistant (Simone Ashley) to make sure she’s not committing a terrible social gaffe. Her inattention to detail costs her when the magazine needs to walk back a regrettable puff piece on the fast fashion industry. News of Andy’s sudden unemployment prompts the publisher to hire her as the new features editor without Miranda’s knowledge, which leads to the amusing spectacle of Andy walking breezily into the Runway office only to get treated like a second assistant again. While Miranda’s right hand Nigel (Stanley Tucci) has stuck around all these years, managing cheaper shoots and skinnier budgets, Andy’s former mentor/frenemy Emily (Emily Blunt) has shifted into an executive suite at Dior. 

The plotting of The Devil Wears Prada 2 shrewdly incorporates the humble realities of putting out a magazine when the staff has been winnowed to a skeleton crew, success is measured in page views, and corporate entities are running editorial decisions through efficiency consultants. Oddly enough, the film is more successful as a media meta-narrative than as a sequel that mashes the expected buttons, mainly because we’ve already gotten past the part when Andy is the picked-on fashion disaster at the office. The more Frankel and McKenna acknowledge that their fresh-out-of-college heroine is now a seasoned editor in her 40s, the better The Devil Wears Prada 2 gets, not least because it doesn’t have to jettison the upscale fantasies and juicy machinations of Miranda's world entirely. Like Miranda herself at one point in the movie, it’s healthy to spend a little time flying in coach. — Scott Tobias  

The Devil Wears Prada 2 opens in luxury theaters and filthy old multiplex chains alike tonight.

Deep Water
Dir. Renny Harlin
107 min.

There’s a chance that in the not-so-distant future, viewers in search of Adrian Lyne’s 2022 erotic thriller Deep Water—a film released recently enough to have been reviewed within the relatively short life of this publication—will stumble instead upon this 2026 film directed by action veteran Renny Harlin. They could do worse than to stick around. The new Deep Water doesn’t offer much in the way of erotic thrills, apart from a relatively tame, ill-fated attempt to join the Mile High Club, but it features elements aplenty from other genres, and many echoes of Harlin’s past work. Once the next big thing in action movies thanks to muscular, energetic early ’90s hits like Die Hard 2: Die Harder and Cliffhanger, Harlin remains an extremely active filmmaker, dividing his time between America and China (with occasional trips elsewhere) for the sort of under-the-radar projects that often appear only briefly in theaters before moving to smaller screens. Those sorts of adjusted expectations might have made another director lazy and willing to cut corners, but there’s no evidence of that in this supremely and satisfyingly silly film. It’s the full Harlin.

More or less reprising his Sully role, Aaron Eckhart co-stars as Ben, the first officer of a fully booked international flight bound for Shanghai but destined to meet some troubles along the way. These can be firmly laid at the feet of a single passenger, a first-class a-hole named Dan (Angus Sampson), who we meet smoking in an airport’s non-smoking area as he shoves a short-circuiting portable battery into some checked luggage. This act of jerkitude cascades into a mid-air disaster that forces Ben and the plane’s captain (Ben Kingsley) to make an emergency water landing. (See above, re: Sully.) Not everyone survives, but those who do find that their problems have just begun, thanks to landing amidst a school of hungry sharks.

As the director of both the partly airborne Die Hard 2 and the shark thriller Deep Blue Sea, Harlin is uniquely qualified to splice together these seemingly incompatible subgenres, but he doesn’t stop there. Working from a screenplay by Pete Bridges, Shayne Armstrong, S.P. Krause, and Damien Power, Harlin also tips his hat to classic disaster films, especially The Poseidon Adventure (which one character directly mentions) by spreading his cast across several different airplane sections as they fend for their lives while working through their personal dramas. For Ben, that’s the cancer-stricken son he’s taken to leaving behind for long stretches, a sad situation that the film gives about the same space it allots to a paper thin drama involving the forbidden love between a pair of Chinese athletes. (He’s team captain. She’s one of his players. Can this possibly be overcome?)

The plot mechanics play out, well, mechanically, but everyone involved understands what part they’re playing and plays it well. Eckhart’s an appropriately stoic hero. Kate Fitzpatrick, a veteran of the Australian stage, has great fun as a salty grandmother. Sampson rises to the challenge of playing a character without a single redeeming quality. Most importantly, Harlin never half-asses the assignment, bringing real tension to the crash sequence and staging the shark attacks as brief, bloody, and chaotic. There might not be anything in Deep Water that hasn’t been done better in other movies, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t done well here. And there’s something to be said for its efficiency: The conspicuous acts of homage often make it like you’re watching three or four different movies at the same time. —Keith Phipps

Deep Water plunges into theaters tonight.