“Let me know when your whole life goes up in smoke. Means it's time for a promotion.”

This was an interesting movie for me because I already knew before hitting play that it was out of my interests when it comes to the types of things that I like to watch, and that that would mean I likely wouldn’t like it. With the sequel just coming out, though, I decided to watch it with my mom because I knew she kind of liked it (and my mom doesn’t like very many movies). While I would unfortunately say that this didn’t really hit for me, I’d still say I found it fairly enjoyable and did like a few things about it.

In a current world where a lot of movies just sort of blend together in terms of their style, this film was definitely quite refreshing to watch (hopefully the sequel keeps that). It certainly has that 2000s cheesy feel to it, for better and for worse, but more so better, I would say, and even a little bit of its own flavor too. The editing and all of the acting performances are delightfully over the top, and it makes for a very memorable watch, even if it’s still a movie I probably won’t be going back to anytime soon.

Speaking of the performances, I really enjoyed everyone here and their characters. Stanley Tucci as Nigel, a stylist for Runway magazine, was easily the standout for me despite him not really being in the movie as long as I would have initially thought, and I’d say he’s the main reason for me being still somewhat interested in seeing the sequel. He’s a lot more serious than any of the other characters, but still in that “over the top way,” and therefore stole every scene he was in.

I’ve also never seen Anne Hathaway in a leading role before, and I think she did an excellent job here as her respective character, Andy Sachs. What Andy Sachs is really looking for is a career in journalism, but decides to work for the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine, Miranda Priestly, to sort of open the door for more opportunities down the road. I didn’t expect her character to have as much depth as she did, and her way of portraying this sense of loss of what actually makes life worth living in her new job was done very well. While her character arc was pretty generic, I would say, it was still well conveyed in my opinion.

I also really liked the themes of basically forgetting what originally made you enjoy life and losing yourself in this materialistic world, which, in the case of this film, is the fashion industry. At the beginning of The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs is happy and in a very stable and promising relationship, which we see kind of spiral further into the runtime. While I still definitely saw where the story was going pretty much by the end of the first act, it was still rather effective nonetheless.

Starting off with the negatives, I’m going to have to be completely honest here, this was my first Meryl Streep movie (as crazy as that is) and I found her character to be the worst part of this particular film. I think Streep does a completely okay job (though I can imagine her doing much better in her more highly regarded works), but I found Miranda Priestly to be borderline insufferable the whole way through. I know she is the central antagonist and designed to be over-the-top in a sort of “hate her” kind of way, but I really dislike villains that just annoy you every time you see them onscreen.

The film as a whole is also extremely predictable and, on a story level, very generic. As soon as the main plot really started going, I could pretty much tell where the entire rest of the story was headed. Being predictable isn’t necessarily always a bad thing, I would say, but when it’s so predictable that you can pretty much see the end from the start, and everything goes exactly as you could imagine, it begins to make the movie feel a little boring, which was unfortunately the case with my experience.

While The Devil Wears Prada is firmly in the “not for me” category of movies, I still can definitely see why someone else would enjoy it and why I’m on the other side of the fence when it comes to my opinion on it. I can also very definitively say that I’m pretty much as far away from its intended audience as one can get. I can’t imagine a bunch of other guys my age rushing out to the theater to see this in 2006, or even to its sequel this year. It’s fairly well made, just not something I will probably ever go back to.

It also kind of has some adultery in it and, while I wouldn’t say it totally glorifies it, it definitely skims over the repercussions of it.