In this long-awaited legacy sequel, we check in on the four principal characters we first met at Runway Magazine in 2006

Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is now facing retirement, threats of a corporate takeover and the general demise of print magazines (remember them?). Stanley Tucci remains her art director, because you don’t mess with perfection.

Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is now an award-winning journalist who, to her surprise, is offered the job of features editor at the venerable fashionista bible (not Miranda’s idea). Emily Charlton (Emily Blunt), formerly Miranda’s harried assistant, is now a rival. Director David Frankel and screenwriters Aline Brosh McKenna and Lauren Weisberger complete the first film’s original talent pool.

So is it as good as the 2006 film? Ask better questions. How could it be? But for the first of this one’s two hours, I greatly enjoyed getting back into the glitteringly shallow world of these people. Plenty of Easter eggs and so many celebrity cameos that I just stopped counting. Fan service gone wild. Not great, but you could find worse ways to spend two hours in a movie theater.

I’ll watch any movie starring these four pros. But because it’s a sequel, the filmmakers had to come up with something for them to do, and the wheels started coming off the moment they hinted at a more human, caring side to Miranda. Then the highly cliched nepo-baby son of the late publisher shows up. With new ideas.

It meanders more than a little and gets steadily more sentimental as the second hour counts down, including an entirely superfluous romantic sub-plot. Bottom line: The first movie is now a timeless classic; this is a one-season fad. (119 min).