Review of The Devil Wears Prada (2006) by Anthony K — 10 Feb 2017

Everyone has that list of films that they "have to see." At least that's what you're told by friends who start foaming at the mouth when you admit to not seeing a movie that they have the slightest interest in. Hyperbole is responsible for killing my expectations of a lot of things. Thanks to rabid fans and their baskets of superlatives, Doctor Who and Firefly both give off a horrendous stink that has kept me far away. And on the flipside, decently entertaining films have let me down because of effusive overhype. Mean Girls in particular was a funny movie. Notice I said "funny" and not "hilarious," "hysterical," or "an indispensable marvel of comedy." That's because that's all it is: funny. The years leading up to my eventual viewing of it led me to believe something different. It was supposedly the harbinger of the 21st century teen comedy and an absolute delight to the millions of people who quoted it daily. Imagine my surprise when I finally saw it.

But this isn't a review of Mean Girls. The experience I had, hopes fading and the feeling of being cheated, reemerged when I sat down to (finally) dive into another supposed mid-00's gem. I don't hear The Devil Wears Prada being discussed often, but when it is, it's always using (you guessed it) superlatives. Meryl Streep's performance is one for the ages. Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt have amazing comic chemistry. It's the funniest movie ever made about fashion (kind of pigeonholing yourself there, don't you think?). But I'm a jaded old man and so I tried not to let unrealistic expectations ruin it for me.

Even then, The Devil Wears Prada let me down. A lot.

The first glaring issue in my ears - or my ears rather - is its lazy monotonous soundtrack. It layers on track after track of bland adult contemporary music that blend into each other like a single song on repeat. It sounds like royalty free elevator musak shoved in as a placeholder that the editor forgot to replace before exporting the final print. Imagine the sappy soundtrack of Love Actually, but without the cajones to push audience emotions in any directions. It's just blah and it makes the movie blah by being there.

This movie is also famous for giving Meryl Streep another notch in her Oscar nomination belt (she's up to twenty now), but though her performance is good, she isn't even the best part of this movie. The Academy seems to award her just for showing up. Granted, she's one of the premiere talents of our time, but she isn't flawless. If we're going to look at truly deserving performances in this movie, all eyes should be on Stanley Tucci. His bitchy, mentor-figure Nigel is an absolute delight and outshines Streep with biting wit and calculated affectation. It makes you wish that writer Aline Brosh KcKenna had written Simon Baker and Adrian Grenier out of the movie entirely and replaced their scenes with more Nigel. Is there a fan-made supercut of this out there somewhere? Because there needs to be.

In the end, this movie didn't even leave me with the deflated feeling I got from Mean Girls. That movie was good, but not as good as I had been led to believe. The Devil Wears Prada is just boring, preaches unchecked materialism, and is dated by its depiction of pre-recession college grads in New York. At least I got to check this off my list forever. 3.9/10.