I fear I have very little to say about The Devil Wears Prada 2 (Not Sponsored by Diet Coke).

Legacy sequels tend to be a brilliant cash-out for everyone involved – the big, indispensable stars get to hike up their price, the studio can justify a major marketing push, and everyone who loved the first film across decades of exposure – the widest audience anyone can hope to build for a film – will go to see it at least once.

In this regard, I try not to get too snippy about bad sequels, as, especially in this era, they're likely to fund the smaller, more original filmmaking we know and love by enabling Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway to exercise creative freedom. I don't believe Mother Mary would have been funded if films such as The Devil Wears Prada 2 weren't already on Hathaway's docket.

Discussions about the economics of the industry are a discussion for a different article, but needless to say, The Devil Wears Prada 2 harms no one. It has something interesting to say, it is genuinely nice to watch Andy, now much more resilient, heal her earlier time at Runway with a more robust and headstrong approach, and the politics were alright with me.

This wasn't a nothing burger – there just isn't much more to say. As new aficionados will come to see, and old aficionados know all too well, I do love a good yap – so it is so surprising to me that I have so little to say about the film. Even leaving the theatre, I couldn't muster up even a First Reactions.

This was not the case with Mother Mary, the Ham in the middle of my film sandwich that day (between TDWP2 and Eagles of the Republic, review coming soon). Hathaway has cultivated a really balanced diet of projects, and David Lowery's Psychological drama is likely to be the salt that cuts the otherwise rather saccharine year she's embarking on. The film is raw, it's almost entirely metaphorical, and it's expansive in its scope, even visually. It has so much to say about womanhood, ambition, and the wounds it leaves behind.

In contrast, much has been said about the love interest Andy has in The Devil Wears Prada – a fine reversal of the issues of the first film, where the boyfriend was clearly the worst. Now, Andy is the bad guy, to some extent – and the note people seem to be missing is that this softens Andy's rigid sense of only good and only bad into something more of a "good people are capable of bad things" ethos, which definitely could have been developed more.

All else that needs to be said about the film has been said – I doubt there'll be a third. I did love it. I do think it will have staying power, and a renaissance in 10 years when the kids decide it's actually better than the original, and the world will keep spinning.

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