Most franchise reboots these days are more of an exercise in self referential nostalgia than in any desire to tell something even resembling a self contained story. Even putting reboots aside, if there aren’t clear drops of callbacks, quotes, and ham-fisted attempts at bringing back characters we remember, then it seems like Hollywood is not interested in revisiting these IPs. These movies are rarely about anything more than the movies that came before them, and use these tricks to instill a sense of glorious purpose upon themselves. So it’s refreshing to see something like The Devil Wears Prada 2 actually have a take that is at least less reliant on winking at the camera at every opportunity imaginable.

Centering once again on Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) now as a fully bona fide award winning journalist. Unfortunately it’s taking place in the world we all live in and right before she wins a prestigious award her and her colleagues get the news that they have all been laid off. Media after all is not doing well. Meanwhile – her former employer Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is finding herself in similar waters as a massive scandal has taken over at Runway, the fashion magazine that she manages. The owner of the publication house hires Andy to be the Chief Editor of Features for the magazine and the two women must work alongside one another to right the ship of not only the fashion magazine, but it seems like media as a whole.

The movie manages to reunite most of the cast, with Stanley Tucci playing the affable Nigel, and Emily Blunt returning as the icy Emily. The Devil Wears Prada 2 manages to highlight the state of media in clever and poignant ways, most notably by showing how when young tech CEOs take over things they manage to strip them of all of the good and interesting things that made them special. We see Justin Theroux as an oblivious billionaire, not necessarily evil mind you, but careless. Both in terms of how he manages the companies he gobbles up, but also how much it affects him when things go wrong. Which is to say, not at all. It’s a character that feels very much like a stand in for Jeff Bezos, who famously bought The Washington Post, a once mighty newspaper house that recently laid off a third of its staff.

The other hapless CEO is a young up and comer played by BJ Novak, an actor who feels like shorthand for insufferable business bro since his stint on The Office. He is not at all interested in the actual output of any of the businesses he manages, simply the efficiency. Can we make it for cheaper? Can we make it faster? What are the things we can cut? He is so quick to trim the tree that he doesn’t realize soon he’ll be standing in front of a stump.

Neither of these characters are evil mind you, they are simply not interested in life outside of the bottom line. There are no feelings of ill will, they’re just doing the most logical thing. There’s a line delivered with the frigid precision that got Meryl Streep her Academy Award Nomination in the first movie, “You’re not a visionary, you’re a vendor.” These one percenters think they can simply buy their way into a life where they can be taste makers and trend setters, only to realize they have none of the skills required, and that’s what this movie is about at its heart.

As well crafted as The Devil Wears Prada 2 is, it does revel in the occasional callback I was bemoaning earlier. They are more subtle than the worst offenders, but they are there. But even that being said, this movie is doing what movies are supposed to do, it’s being what a movie is supposed to be. It’s telling a story about something, and it’s something that makes sense, that these characters fit into, and it’s much more poignant that I expected it to be.

3.5/5