Whenever a sequel is announced, there's usually some question about how good it's going to be in relation to the first. Especially when a movie is as beloved as The Devil Wears Prada, there's a lot the movie has to live up to. Thankfully, this sequel does a lot right.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 sees the return of Anne Hathaway as Andy Sachs, who, shortly after getting fired from her current job, gets a call to return to Runway. She finds out upon arriving that it was not Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) who rehired her, and seemingly, Miranda doesn't even remember her. Nigel (Stanley Tucci) still works at Runway twenty years later, but Emily (Emily Blunt) no longer does, instead working at Dior.

The return of these four iconic characters starts the movie out at an advantage. All four performances are just as strong as they were twenty years ago. These are four top tier actors who effortlessly found these characters all over again, and the familiarity sets us right back into this world.

The first half of the movie is genuinely very fun, maybe even more so than the first movie. There's a lot of the same, but there's also a lot pushing the narrative forward. We see how hurt Andy is that Miranda doesn't remember her and how there's an even bigger drive for Andy to impress her than in the first film. We see Andy want to reconnect with Emily and know when and why she left Runway. We see how effortlessly she reconnects with Nigel and is surprised he hasn't really gone anywhere with his career. We see where these characters have grown and where they have stayed the same through the eyes of Andy, and we see how much that drives her actions and desires throughout the film.

The subplots also work better here than in the first film. My biggest issue with the original film is how disjointed it can all feel when we go from scenes of Andy working to scenes of her boyfriend to scenes of her friends. Here, those similar story beats felt more naturally weaved in. The friends feel like they serve a little more of a purpose than just noticing that the job is changing her. While the romance could have easily been written out of this film, it still feels a step beyond the one note nature of Nate from the first film. This isn't to say it was perfect, or that I still didn't prefer the scenes when we're focused on Andy at work, but it didn't disrupt the flow nearly as much.

The third act is where the movie starts to lose me. It never completely loses the fun spirit of the movie, but it has so much payoff that it wants to give that it starts to feel repetitive. Character realizations about another character or about something that happened earlier in the film happen are handled in the same way with the same beats for what feels like twenty scenes in a row. Many of these moments felt necessary, but there had to be a way to spread them out more or let some of them develop more naturally. This is where it felt like the flow was interrupted with these scenes causing a more somber tone than these movies are typically going for. It left me ready for the movie to end a few scenes before it did, which is disappointing when the first half is so fun.

Still, as a sequel, this was very satisfying. Most of it felt like it built upon the first and even improved in some aspects. While a better final act could have gotten me to say this is the better movie, I still left feeling like it was on par with it, and that's all I really need from a sequel.

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