The Ham or the Pig 

I suppose you could argue that the story wasn’t what Director James Cameron was aiming for, it was the visuals. The spectacle of it all was the point, and it certainly shows.

My review’s title is a nod to Shakespeare and is entirely deliberate. The original movie portrayed the high-end fashion world as a brutal arena of plotting, backstabbing, and betrayal, and most Shakespeare’s plays depend on these plot devices. The Devil Wears Prada 2 uses the same formula, and is, plot-wise, almost identical. Once again, we plunge into the cutthroat world of Runway, where to get and stay at the top, you must let go of your principles and moral sense. The only thing different is that due to the digital era, Runway is not a print magazine anymore, but one that is running online.

I write for a diversity-focused film review blog, so I’ll be honest: I really wanted to like Pretty Lethal. Starring Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Iris Apatow, Avantika, and Millicent Simmonds, Amazon Prime’s new thriller seemed like it would be a girl power movie about dancers with a horror action twist. Sort of a Suspiria for teens. But with shallow and unlikeable characters, a confusing plot, an overreliance on violence, and cringey dialogue, any fun the movie started out with was quickly lost. What was left was a faint echo of greater horror movies about dancers made before. 

The more we learned with each passing minute the bigger the reveal. This film ends with a serious bang and it was truly a joy to watch.

Adam McKay might have been more concerned with cramming cameos than he was in this story which is a bloated criticism of the rich and famous… delivered unto us by the rich and famous. 

The beating heart of this film is the relationship between Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse.