Four decades after a mid-’80s mini-boom in projects like Psycho II and The Color of Money brought some novelty to sequel-mania, it’s no longer so unusual for legacy sequels to pick up with beloved characters 10, 20, or 30 years after a previous film. In fact, sometimes it seems like Hollywood is systematically going through every movie that made $50 million domestic or more since 1996 or so, and evaluating whether it might be turned into a multi-generational saga. (Movies from before 1996 can just be distended into streaming miniseries watched by no one.) Case in point: The Devil Wears Prada, the toast of the 2006 summer movie season, now the subject of a big summer-kickoff sequel expected to do blockbuster numbers at the box office.

20 years ago, it wasn’t so wildly unusual for a starry bit of summer counter-programming to post blockbuster grosses, and Prada performed the unusual trick of simultaneously boosting the decades-old career of star Meryl Streep (playing a thinly veiled version of imperious Vogue editor Anna Wintour) and minting a newer star out of an ascendant Anne Hathaway (playing an initially hapless and fashion-clueless assistant).

Yet the movie, like so many character-based comedies, dramas, and dramedies of this era, did not seem to beg for a follow-up. At the end, Andy (Hathaway) and Miranda (Streep) part ways semi-contentiously but with a newfound respect for one another, and each getting what they want. Andy will score the journalism job she really wanted in the first place; Miranda will hold fast to control of her personal fashion empire as the editor-in-chief of Runway magazine, this world’s version of Vogue. The fact that Lauren Weisberger, author of the original Devil Wears Prada novel, wrote two sequels (and a host of other books) to shruggy reception seemed to seal it: If they weren’t making those into movies, maybe everyone was agreeing to take the win and move on.

In a sense, that’s sort of true even with the movie sequel: None of Weisberger’s books are credited as the inspiration for The Devil Wears Prada 2; only her characters are. In fact, it’s easy to read one subplot as weirdly running down Weisberger’s decision to write a fictionalized and gossipy version of her real-life time at Vogue under Anna Wintour, with Andy fretting over the ethics of writing a book about Miranda that would be sure to score her a huge advance. Apparently no such nerves exist about the paydays of a cinematic Devil Wears Prada follow-up, perhaps ushered into existence by Disney’s refusal to see its 20th Century Fox library as anything but an IP mine. (Is Devil Wears Prada a Predator movie for the girlies?!)

It’s easy, then, to build up some resistance to this new movie – especially if you rewatch the old one (as the streaming charts indicate many of us have been) and realize what a flimsy screenwriter-manual concoction it is. The Devil Wears Prada makes an effort to dimensionalize Miranda, and of course Streep works understated wonders; she never stops seeming imposing yet only occasionally feels like a genuine villain. But these nuances only result in a lopsided movie that wants to indulge in the capitalist fantasy that abusing underlings is a mildly regrettable but ultimately character-building element of pursuing excellence, only to turn around and make Miranda’s greatest crime the mild (and, apparently even worse, self-preserving!) betrayal of her colleague Nigel (Stanley Tucci). The movie avoids giving Andy a truly difficult moral choice; her decisions are all dictated by the needs of the screenplay, which never provides the requisite level of screwball (or even post-screwball) wit to distract from its glossy lack of actual substance. What was that much-repeated (and probably misquoted) Howard Hawks maxim about a movie needing three great scenes and no bad scenes? The Devil Wears Prada makes a feeble negotiation: Are maybe two memorable scenes and a few more hooky lines good enough? Even if the rest alternates cheesy sarcasm with equally cheesy you’ve-changed-man boilerplate?

Skeptical as I am of Prada’s new-classic status, it’s a nice surprise to find that the material has gained some gravitas in its two decades away. The sequel, still directed by David Frankle and written by Aline Brosh McKenna, dives headlong into the hell of the contemporary media industry, with Runway going through a number of editorial crises. Mind, there still isn’t much wit or sparkle in the dialogue; it’s like a sitcom heeded the old Coco Chanel advice about removing an accessory before leaving the house, leaving genuine zingers on the dresser. But Hathaway in particular is in much better shape to fake it all these years later; even in her scenes of relentless eagerness to please, there’s something more relaxed about her performance. Andy has aged into a confident charmer with a more engaging relationship to her work and her boss.

That’s one of the keenest insights the movie has: That audiences don’t necessarily want to see legacy sequels where the characters have evidently spent much of their time away accruing disappointments and setbacks (or at very least, they might enjoy an alternative to this scenario). As we re-join Andy, she has enjoyed a long and successful career in journalism; it’s the perfect touch that the movie understands how this isn’t necessarily enough to keep her afloat in the current economy. Hence she loses her job moments before she wins a journalism award, and finds herself hastily recruited to solve a PR problem at Runway by serving as the mag’s new features editor, very much against Miranda’s will.

Does The Devil Wears Prada 2 truly understand what a features editor does? Willfully no. Can it resist pinning its hopes again on the benevolence of the right rich and powerful people to counterbalance the wrong ones? Also, ever more emphatically, no. To some extent, this series (now that it is one) has doomed itself to compromise between cutting insider insight and unimaginative wish-fulfillment. It also tends to mistake soapy, often soppy personal melodrama for character development. But more than many legacy sequels, you can feel the weight of the years behind Andy, Miranda, Nigel, and still-caustic Emily (Emily Blunt), even if they largely look the same. So many movies fail to convey the sense of genuine life beyond the frame, and Devil Wears Prada 2 is surprisingly convincing about these characters’ offhand ups and downs.

That’s also what makes the movie more than reunion-tour nostalgia, even if it can’t help but further soften Miranda into a kind of chilly-cuddly mascot for old-media indulgence. Watching her forced to fly coach might have once registered as sweet revenge; it certainly would have in the book. Now, more than ever, we’re invited to sympathize with her plight. Then again, given how much richer everyone involved must have gotten over the years, it’s probably a small miracle that the movie remains as connected as it is to the harsh realities of writing, editing, and tastemaking for a living, even if it’s more than happy to back away from the truest possible bleakness. The Devil Wears Prada 2  is a little too cute, overstuffed, and cameo-heavy to qualify as a great movie, or even a top-tier sequel. But it does make Andy and Miranda, in particular, feel like real people rather than hastily drawn caricatures. As such, it manages something few recent legacy sequels have: It deepens the original by association.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream The Devil Wears Prada on HBO Max