The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004)

Garry Marshall returns to Genovia for a second term, and the constitutional crisis of the hour is that a young woman cannot inherit a throne without first acquiring a husband. It is a sequel in the purest sense: same castle, same grandmother, same mattress-surfing instinct for slapstick, with Chris Pine arriving in his feature debut as the scheming viscount's nephew. Shonda Rhimes wrote the screenplay, and its mechanics are competent if unhurried. The kingdom is invented, so no real history is rewritten, and the stakes amount to a wedding.

Where the film shows its progressive sympathies is in the marriage plot itself. Mia refuses a union she does not want, halts the ceremony mid-vows, and asks Parliament whether its members would force the women they love into loveless arrangements. Parliament folds. The epilogue confirms that Genovian women may now sit in that same chamber, a tidy piece of 2000s girl-power bookkeeping. It plays as romance with a spine, not as an ideological program. The supporting cast includes Héctor Elizondo and Raven-Symoné, ordinary heritage casting that never pauses to announce itself. Race is present and entirely unexamined.

The ledger elsewhere is bare. No character is gay, no one mentions the climate, no body is discussed with approval, no mind is diagnosed, and the economics of monarchy go unremarked. The moralizing stays inside the story, an argument delivered to a fictional parliament instead of to the camera. Duty and love are weighed, the heart wins, and Julie Andrews sings on screen for the first time since her throat surgery. We are left with a glossy, harmless bauble that argues for a woman's right to choose her husband and then stops, satisfied. Classification complete. The tiara holds.