The Devil Wears Prada 2 review – a sequel? For spring? Groundbreaking

The fashion and magazine industries have had a makeover but this glossy knock-off reunites the old team – and recycles the old plot – with style

Twenty years have gone by; the fashion and publishing worlds have changed but Satan’s clothing and accessory choices are pretty much what they were. It’s time for a sprightly and amiable sequel to the adored mid-00s Manhattan romcom that followed the adventures of would-be serious writer and saucer-eyed ingenue Andrea “Andy” Sachs, played by Anne Hathaway. Straight out of college in one of the flyover states, she fluked a job at iconic New York fashion magazine Runway, edited by the terrifying and amusingly surnamed Miranda Priestly, played of course by Meryl Streep. Miranda doesn’t look a day older in the sequel, and nor does Nigel, played by Stanley Tucci, still in post as her loyal, worldly, privately melancholy second-in-command.

This follow-up is fun, though let down by Andy’s bafflingly dreary and chemistry-free romance with a dull Australian real estate magnate (a tepid role for Patrick Brammall from TV’s Colin from Accounts). Miranda’s latest submissive prince-consort boyfriend is played by Kenneth Branagh, bizarrely the lead violinist in a string quartet. The film also gives us a lot of star-fan cameos – this is usually a bad sign, but managed well enough here. Not the big cameo though, not the one they were surely chasing, the white whale of cameos: Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor on whom Priestly is modelled.