Director David Frankel and Screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna both deserve to be given a resounding pat on the back for this "twenty years after" sequel to "The Devil Wears Prada."

"The Devil Wears Prada 2" knows when to deviate from the source material, and give a contemporary sheen to the narrative. It’s glossy, it has attitude, it manages expectations, and nimbly provides fan service to those who loved the 2003 novel of Lauren Weisberger, and the 2006 film adaptation.

There’s even enough drama, and character comedy, for those who never watched the first film, to enjoy this one.

And it smartly ignores the Weisberger-penned sequel, "Revenge Wears Prada," or her "When Life Gives You Lululemons," a novel that inhabited the Devil Wears Prada-universe.

The sequel is far from perfect; but it holds up, and is good-natured entertainment. It tackles head on the fact that today’s fashion glossies are hanging by a silk thread - their readership and influence ruled more by nostalgia than actual eyeballs. It acknowledges how all content has to now be digitized, and turned into social media fodder. That print editions are dinosaurs at the mercy of advertising, and perpetuated for prestige; but don’t carry much traction.

There’s a scene at the Met Gala when the social influencers are shown, and there’s that sense of how the magazine Runway, and its Creative Director Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), are heading to the door marked Exit in red, and this film is both a look of fond remembrance, and a last grasp at magazine glory.

As in that first film, the main cast of characters consist of ‘Andy’ Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Nigel, Miranda’s second-in-command (Stanley Tucci), and Emily (Emily Blunt), who’s now the head of Dior in the USA.

The big difference here is that when we first meet Andy in this sequel, she is a serious journalist who has just received an award - ironically, on the same day that her news platform, the Vanguard, is downsized, and she’s left without a job. Its the first bit of foreshadowing on the state of traditional journalism today that we encounter in this up to date narrative. 

In fact, even back in 2006, the role of Vogue and Anna Wintour as Bible and high priestess of the global fashion world was already on the wane.

The actual miracle is how two decades later, the two still exist at all.

This film is self-aware about that, and even pokes meta-fun at the idea of someone authoring a tell-it-all roman a clef about working on the premier fashion magazine of the world, and serving under someone like an Anna Wintour. 

If there are faults to this sequel, they would be minor ones.

Director David Frankel directed "Sex In the City" and "Entourage," and there are times that this film feels more like a better budgeted TV movie - even when on location, in Milan and Lugano, the framing feels like its for television.

The last ten minutes of the film are spent indulgently on tying loose ends, and giving all four main characters their closing glory moment.

Those who have watched the film, may agree with me that the stronger closing scene would have been Andy and Miranda in the back seat of a sedan, after leaving the Vermont estate of their new ‘owner’. That would have been more than enough as the film’s last shot.

Ultimately, the film is about fan service, and bringing us up to date on the lives of these four, who struck such a chord with audiences those twenty years ago.

The cameos fly fast and furious in this film; and while several make perfect sense given the film’s context, just as many seem more a case of "because we could."

Fun to count them and tag as ‘noted’, but they don’t actually add anything to the story or film’s progress.

What I loved more was the reappearance of a cerulean sweater vest that Andy had worn to work on her first day in the first film.