Mark Kermode (17:43)
No, no, absolutely. So Emily has also managed to bag herself an extremely wealthy sugar daddy, Benji, who may be in a position to make her even more of a power player. Benji is the ex husband of Lucy L's Sasha Barnes, who is one of the richest and most powerful women on earth, with whom Miranda Priestley would love to get an in to get an interview. And she similarly has the ability to pull strings because of her wealth, as did Miranda's mentor, the owner of Runway, Ira, who then inconveniently drops dead, leaving his altogether less tolerable son Jay to take over the business and scupper Miranda's empire climbing plans. And the first thing you notice from this is there is an awful lot of plot. I mean most of it feels entirely performative and perfunctory. I mean it is just a way of getting characters that you knew and enjoyed 20 years ago back into situations in which they can do, do the thing that you enjoyed 20 years ago. Whilst I mean seriously that, you know, the plot of the original is really simple, right? Wide eyed graduate enters the world of fashion, encounters dragon like presence who scares and humiliates her. But finally she comes to understand her during the course of the drama. Right, this is just a bunch of. I'm sorry, I don't believe a word of any of this. In terms of the. Of the machinations of the plot, none of it rings true. I can see what you're trying to do. You're just trying to put everybody back together on screen. And from the opening scene of this, in which Andy receives an award for her hard hitting journalism and immediately gets fired by the magazine, which is cutting all its journalists contemporary to the final denouement in which. Can you have. Final denouement. That's probably a tautology, whatever it is, in which Andy and Moran can you have a. Yeah, the denim is a bit just before the film anyway, but to the bit at the end when there's this whole thing that the two of them team up together to pull this very unbelievable ace card out of their Louis Vuitton handbags. None of the plot, none of the plot makes any sense at all, at all. It is literally just there to put the characters in the spaces together. That is kind of, you know, that's all right. That's what happens with sequels. Disappointingly so. However, the problem with this is that. Well, the first thing is, do you remember in the original film there is a great Scene in which Miranda Priestley, who is this, you know, I said dragon like presence, does this really brilliant speech in which Andy says, you know, this whole thing is all irrelevant. And she says, oh, oh really, it's irrelevant. It's got nothing to do with you. It's got nothing to do with the real world. Which is kind of amusing because you think that you've got, you know, you're exempt from all this fashion stuff. But that lumpy blue sweater that you're wearing, do you know how that got there? And then she does this thing about that sweater was actually selected for you by the people in this room because that sweater is not blue, it's actually cerulean. And that was something that was. And she does this whole kind of speech about how the, the kind of apparently functional sweater that Andy is wearing comes from this other. This whole kind of, you know, thousands of jobs within the fashion industry. And it's a great scene. And the reason it's a great scene is because it gives the sort of non nominal villain of the piece, the person who throws their coat at assistance and behaves really badly, an argument for why they are who they are. And you know, it does the thing about. It kind of upends things. It's a bad comparison. But it's like the thing in, in the Dark Knight in which Joker says to Batman, don't do that. Don't do that. You and I are the same person. And does that great thing about, you know, it's one of those things. There is nothing of that caliber in the sequel. What there is is a couple of opportunities for Meryl Streep to do that haughty imperial thing that she does so well. I mean, the scene, the beginning, in which Andy is in the office and she doesn't even recognize her is really, really funny. Then there is some completely unnecessary and utterly unbelievable world turned upside down stuff in which they end up having to travel coach for the first time. And she's appalled by, you know, what it's like not being in first class. Then there's this nod to the change in the world from print journalism to online journalism and the stuff about journalism generally being under attack and that is sort of there in order to give it a inverted commas contemporary edge. But I don't believe any of it. It's just zeitgeisty window dressing. As for Emily Blunt, I think she is poorly underserved by a script which kind of reduces her just to the level of caricature which she wasn't in the first Film. And then there's the big set pieces. There's a big set pie in which Lady Gaga performs a song which just reminded me of Liza Minnelli coming out at the wedding in Sex and the City 2. Most importantly, it's neither funny nor biting enough to earn its keep. And watching this, you kind of understand why it is it took such a long time for the sequel to come about. Because for a long time, the key cast members said they didn't want to do it, and then now they have done it, you go, well, you might have been right the first time. None of which is to say that this isn't going to be a hit. I mean, there is, you know, when you have the kind of talent that you've got on screen and those characters, of course, there are bits of it that are fun and people will go and they'll, you know. But here's the thing. Whilst the original is still memorable 20 years later, this is going to be forgotten 20 minutes after you've seen it. You might have a perfectly fine time in the time that you're watching it, but 20 minutes later, you're going to be very, very hard pressed to repeat the plot. It is not going to inspire any lumpy blue jumpers somewhere down the line. It is very, very. All right.
