Hollywood is littered with failed attempts to recapture the magic of beloved movies. Sequels are well and good, but when they come out many years after the original, there’s some understandable concern. For every Top Gun: Maverick that finds a way to make it work, there’s a Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or two that fall absolutely flat. With that in mind, my excitement for The Devil Wears Prada 2, releasing two decades after the iconic original film, was not high. I expected a nostalgia-laced cash grab designed to capitalize on a once beloved movie. I have rarely been this pleased to be wrong.

Picking up twenty years after the end of the first movie, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is now an award-winning journalist whose days of working at Runway magazine are far behind her. Until that is, her entire newspaper division is shut down in favor of online content, leaving her and her colleagues without jobs. Meanwhile, Andy’s old boss at Runway, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is in hot water over a public relations mistake. Desperate to find work for herself and her team, Andy returns to the magazine and must find a way to save it and Miranda.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is just how much it actually has to say. Director David Frankel, along with writers Aline Brosh McKenna and Lauren Weisberger, would probably have been forgiven for just replaying the hits and cashing their checks. Instead, they use the first film as a foundation for a new story about modern media culture and the death of traditional journalism. It’s still The Devil Wears Prada, but it’s trying to tell us something.

The characters benefit from this dedication to actual storytelling as well. Miranda hasn’t changed much, which may not be surprising, but Andy is a much more mature and watchable protagonist this time around. She is competent, smart, and no longer feels like a fish out of water in her work. Her struggles come from the fact that the internet and modern content creation care more about clicks than integrity or talent. Hathaway navigates the new version of Andy beautifully. While Streep isn’t tasked with much of a change to her character, she also does fantastic work bringing Miranda to life once again.

The other characters in the film get a bit short-changed, however. Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt return in their respective roles and are both once again spectacular. Sadly, there’s not nearly as much for either of them to do. Blunt in particular is absent from a big chunk of the film, and I felt like that was a mistake. The new characters do nothing to make up for that, as they are all barely in the film and hardly worth remembering. Nobody should blame the actors, they all do the best you could hope for with what limited time they have, but the movie simply does not care about them.

The structure and pacing of the film are also strange. Hathaway and Streep carry the early parts of the story well enough, but the actual plot doesn’t kick off until well over a third of the way into the movie. It makes the runtime feel much longer than it actually is. By the time the movie actually ended, I’d been ready for it to be over for at least ten minutes. There is almost certainly a better way to streamline the narrative, so the pacing doesn’t feel so bad.

That said, everyone involved deserves credit for what they accomplished with The Devil Wears Prada 2. At no point does the movie feel unnecessary or meaningless and it’s an absolute blast to watch. I’d even argue that you can enjoy it without having seen the original, though fans are going to find plenty of callbacks and Easter eggs that they’ll love. If you aren’t sure whether you should give this one a shot in theaters, I’ll just quote Miranda Priestly herself; “Go.”