Customer Reviews

The Devil's Advocate [VHS]

5 star:		(121)
4 star:		(57)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Here comes a sharp, strong-voiced New York city lawyer with a lot of experience complemented by rare physical and mental powers. Played by Al Pacino, John Milton is a loner who wins cases by ignoring what is and isn't "by the book". While in the process of establishing a law partner, Milton runs across hot shot Keanu Reeves, who is yet to lose. Reeves turns out to become the perfect missing piece to the puzzle for Pacino. His character spends a significant amount of time with his new law partner in business and pleasure circumstances, in order to indirectly let his new friend know him better, to find out who he really is. As time passes, tension between the two businessmen arises and Keanu, the perfect defender/convicter sees his life unfold to become a total nightmare.

"The Devils Advocate" has been compared to "The Firm", but "The Firm" is more drawn out and isn't in with the fantasy or horror genre. Al Pacino really shows his stuff in this, with a more than believable performance that features numerous profound monologues that are always mastered by this Italian legend. His costar, Keanu, hits the target for the first time, bringing genuine emotion and class to the table. Overall, "The Devil's Advocate" is very intriguing, extremely well acted with some impressive special effects. I found this movie to be one of the best of the 90s.

There is an old saying that in a court-of-law it is irrelevant what the truth is. What DOES matter is the calibre of the lawyers that reside on both sides of the judiciary fence. This movie takes that dictum and pushes it to the edge of the envelope.

One of the most intriguing facets of the storyline is an implicit question that the film compels us to ask ourselves: Who is worse off? A prosecutor who is so good that he gets an innocent man executed or put away for life? Or a defense lawyer who is so good that he gets a guilty man off the hook, after which time he hurts or kills someone else? It is a question that must enter the minds of all who exercise the art of legalistic oratory at some point or other.

Al Pacino is without question the highlight of the flick. It is obvious that he takes great delight in playing the devil himself, and it shows in his performance. It is a role that is ideally suited to his demeanor. A nice touch was making his name John Milton, which is an allusion to the English poet who authored PARADISE LOST. This is the poem that detailed Satan's fall from heaven as well as Adam & Eve's fall from the Garden of Eden. As a sidenote, I would HIGHLY recommend PARADISE LOST; there are a couple of references to the work itself during the story.

It was rather painful to see Keanu Reeves occasionally try to fake a southern accent, but this was not his worst performance. There is a surprising amount of nudity in the film, and that's always a good thing. This is ESPECIALLY true in any film which features Charlize Theron!

All in all this is a fun film to pick up, especially if you're into the Faustian man-selling-his-soul-to-Satan genre. While the ending is a bit deus ex machina, the balance of the DVD makes up for the weak finale.

"The Devil's Advocate is one of those movies that sneak up on you, grab you and won't let go. The story is simple enough; a young fireball of a lawyer, Kevin Lomax, played by Keanu Reeves, who has never lost a case, finds himself in the middle of every defense attorney's nightmare, representing a slimy sleazeball accused of molesting little girls. Halfway through the trial he realizes his client is guilty as hell, which presents him with a dilemma: he can extend his winning streak at the price of losing his soul; or he can do the right thing at the possible risk of torpedoing his career. What's a young, up and coming hotshot to do? In no time at all, he and his beautiful, fatally naive wife (excellently played by Charlize Theron) are off to New York, where he has been recruited to work for a high-powered law firm headed by a omnilingual, diabolically clever lawyer named John Milton (Al Pacino looks like he had the time of his life in this role) and staffed by a bunch of hell-bound associates. While Kevin's career takes off, his wife descends into a miasma of loneliness, despair and finally madness; and when Kevin berates Milton for driving his wife into her personal hell, Milton reminds Kevin that God, whom Milton fears as much as he hates, gave us all a left-handed gift called free will; we are free to make our own choices, and we have to live with the consequences. As the feller says, you can't win 'em all. The film runs somewhat overlong but holds our interest throughout. There are many good performances in this movie and a few excellent ones, but when all is said and done, the film belongs to Al Pacino and his gleefully wicked portrayal of the devil incarnate. Kevin is finally left to make his own choice, which I'm not going to give away here; suffice to say that the film's resolution is a shock. Maybe you can't win 'em all, but director Taylor Hackford clearly came up a winner with this movie.

While I felt that the film could have been more crisply edited, it builds such unrelenting a crescendo that you'll be willing to indulge several minor scenes take forever to get to their point. How common is it for a film climax to sport a 15-minute scene of dialogue so provocative that the accompanying special effects can almost be ignored!

Keanu Reeves, who's usually a staid one-expression wonder fit for movies like Speed and Matrix, pitches in quite a remarkably absorbing performance here. Which was a pleasant surprise! Pacino needless to say is stellar as usual in his macabre role as Satan.

But the cake goes to Charlize Theron who fits the wife's character like a glove (a role that is never really clearly defined) and fills in some pretty yawning gaps, creating a gradual descent into madness which actually seems realistic enough to be taken seriously.

With slightly more crisp editing, the movie could have easily been the powerhouse it screams that it should have been, but it is still a very decent rental that'll hold for a couple of viewings!

This is a fantastic movie. Al Pacino doesn't get the credit he deserves. He was amazing as Satan. Keanu Reeves was good and Charlize Theron is gorgeous. <Also stars Jeffrey Jones who was the principal in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Craig T. Nelson who was Steven Freeling in Poltergeist.

Keanu Reeves is a Florida district Attorney who is recruited by a big law firm in Manhattan. Kevin (Reeves) accepts the offer and he and Mary (Theron) move to a very exclusive building where most of the lawyers from Milton and his partners firm. Mysterious happenings start to set in and Kevin's mom suspects why. Later on Kevin figures out that John Milton (Al Pacino) is both is father and Satan. Milton needs him to create the Antichrist. Kevin falls into Miltons "trap." Did he dig himself too deep?

The movie leads up to the great ending. Al Pacinco makes memorable moment in the last 20 minutes of the movie ranting and raving. Will Kevin sell his soul to the devil?

The DVD includes deleted scenes which aren't bad but anyone who likes Al Pacino, a decent suspensful thriller will definately add this to their collection.

This movie is actually a shocking wake up call in the moral department. If you follow my reviews, you know that I dislike modern shoot em up movies. But setting this aside, it is interesting how many movies inspire the wrong values. (Shoot everybody up, take down who stands in your way, fall in love, and live happily ever after. I could go on and on, but so many movies fall into this category.) Well, "The Devil's Advocate" seems to be a reaction against the amoral filth that often comes out of the movie theatres. The basic theme of this movie according to its director is: "Do I do the right thing, or do I survive?" The story starts at a courtroom in Florida. Lawyer Kevin Lomax realizes that his client is really guilty, but after a bit of taunting, he gets his client off anyway, and it's not hard to see that satisfying his ego was the main reason he did so. Well, Kevin gets an offer from a law firm in New York City to pick a jury for a client who DID steal millions. Again, Kevin comes through. The leader of this city firm John Milton (Al Pacino) then offers Kevin a job with a tempting salary. So far, this all seems part of the 'American Dream.' (Play some moral games to get to the top if you need to.) Apparently Kevin has gotten there, but the story is FAR from over. Sadly, some vital scenes were deleted for the purpose of time. (One is where Al Pacino says: "Leave morals to God. We have a job to do." Another sadly deleted scene is where Kevin's wife Mary Anne is sent into a room where sexual amoral games are going on.) At the risk of over simplifying a bit, with Al Pacino's well timed appearances, it becomes clear that the more moral games Kevin is willing to play, the further he can go. It is interesting that about half way through the movie, Kevin starts to treat his moral and religious mother with disrespect, and that the marriage between Kevin and Mary Anne starts to have serious problems. An obvious example is when Mary Anne gets a beautiful cut and dye hair job, but Kevin calls it: 'radical' and 'traumatic.' Why? He already has his eyes on other women. (Notably Christa Bella.) Another sadly deleted scene is where it was obvious that if Christa Bella had been present at the dance club, Kevin would have been willing to engage in adultery. The once happy marriage with Mary Anne has become a burden to him. (This is obvious when during a phone call, he lies to her about being at work and starts to get very short with her.) Well, Kevin continues to take the money as well as other things, at the expense of his morals. It is not until he realizes that his new client Alexander, IS guilty of several murders that his conscience starts to wake up. But even if our conscience has awakened, will we listen to it, or will we survive? Kevin realizes that after you have played too many moral games, backing out isn't so easy. And it isn't long before he realizes that Al Pacino is in fact the DEVIL. Perhaps the most frightening moment in this movie is when Kevin tries to blame the devil for everything that happened to him, and the devil can HONESTLY reply: "Wait a minute. Who MADE those decisions?" Another frightening thing about this movie is that we probably all have played moral games in our lives, and this movie confronts us with things we are probably ALL guilty of. Forget the grotesque devils and demons in horror movies who can make you do things. Any priest or nun will say that evil is simply the absence of God. And if the devil did make an appearance, he could very well appear fatherly and likable. And he probably would say things that SOUND good. This movie is proof that in horror, blood and guts are laughable compared to frightening truth that we may wish to avoid.

I think I am finally going to have to admit that I like Keanu Reeves. Every movie I see him in, he's Ted. Ted the lawyer, Ted the Christ-figure, Ted the Buddha-figure, Ted the son of Satan, Ted the guy with the wife turning into a vapire, Ted the serial killer. He's just the same dopy guy in every movie and yet that character is really beginning to grow on me and I'm starting to realize that there is a difference between his roles. Maybe a subtle one but it's a difference. And he must be a very nice guy because he keeps ending up in all the great movies and despite how much I might be starting to like him he's still not THAT talented.

This is a movie of pure brilliant evil. Al Pacino would be great for the last 15 minutes alone when he's over the top, blaspheming against G-d, nature and the American Judicial System. But the fact that Pacino lets himself play it down for most of the movie is great. He's polite. He's suave and there's just something a little off about him. He also lets Keanu have most of the movie. Usually if you are on screen with Pacino, forget about being remembered unless you happened to be DeNiro, but in this movie the director and the actor know how to hang back and make Reeves look good.

Basically this movie is a parable about a lawyer without a conscience or at least without one that is going to stand in the way of winning. Due to his success he gets hired by a high-profile law firm with sinister undertones and begins to get a whole new breed of killers off. Oh yeah, the President of the law firm is Satan.

This movie has some beautiful scenes including the final denoument with Satan and Reeves as well as the empty street of New York City that Keanu Reeves walks over to get to his confrontation. Charlize Theron (sic?) is the unraveling moral fiber that undercuts Reeves' flirtation with the dark side. Where he makes choices and loses a little more of his soul, she goes insane and changes her Belinda Carlisle hairdo to the Belinda Carlisle-postcocaine hairdo.

This is an amazing movie. Brilliant and psychotic. Religious enough to please religious folks and blasphemous enough to entertain everyone else. Rent it, buy it and watch it over and over again.

One caveat: the lawyer as devil storyline has been done to death. It's great here but one wonders why the festering resentment against lawyers is so pervasive. Then again that is on of the few professionals besides drug dealer or hitman where people hate the successful practitioners. Oh well, occupational hazard for the neat cars and the big houses.

This is a very well-made film. Director Taylor Hackford did a great job by keeping the film styish and sleek all the while injecting a faint sense of dread into each of the early scenes that grows and grows until it completely breaks loose by the film's climax.

I'm not going to expound on this film any more, because the eloquent reviewer from Woodstock, GA already did an excellent job of that. However, I do want to point out that this film plays even better in my DVD player than it did when I watched it in the theater. I don't know why, but I guess the sharper DVD image works for it better. Plus, the commentary by Taylor Hackford is extremely insightful. The film itself may go on a bit too long, and the climax still has me shaking my head a bit, but this film is undeniably provocative, giving us a better-than-average Keanu Reeves performance, who obviously has no trouble with a Southern accent (ditto for his British accent in BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, another stylish and excellent film). It also contains a performance by Al Pacino that is his best in years, and one that he clearly had a lot of fun in doing! But the performance that stands out the most for me is by relative newcomer Charlize Theron (originally from South Africa) as Reeves' suffering young wife. Her performance is psychologically complex, sympathetic, and harrowing: she draws you into her character's heart so well that you can't look away. Her performance should have earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress; it's too bad that the Academy didn't agree.

Despite the way the plot of THE DEVIL'S ADVOCATE may read to some viewers, it is not a horror film, per se. It is a very-well-realized, fantastical vision of the good and evil that underpins our money-driven, materialistic society. It contains some rather disturbing scenes, but what is truly disturbing is how real it all seems. For one, I am glad I own it on DVD, and if you are a fan of supernatural and suspensful films, you should own it, too!

This is a very addictive film after the story picks up,gets moving at a faster pace,the characters develope further and the plot thickens...you can't help but get sucked in.My only complaint is Keanue Reeves with his lame Florida country boy accent,it's hard to stomach for over two hours.Al Pacino is fantastic in this film,and there is no doubt that he carries this film from start to end from his charismatic on screen personality and performance,you can't help but love it!Keanue does a great job,I only wish he lost the accent.Not to mention of course,the beautiful Charlize Theron lends a strong supporting role,not to mention her other fabulous attributes.Watch as the plot thickens when hot shot lawyer Kevin gets his strings pulled like a pupet.Only in the end when all seems to be doomed does he learn and accept what has come to be and is put into a position to make a decision that will change humanity and the balance of the world.Will he do it?If you haven't seen this film,I highly reccomend watching it,and you will love the ending."Was there any doubt that the 20th. century wasn't all mine?"Strong biting words that will etch into your memory when spoken so soundly from Satin himself.Kind'a makes you wonder where we are headed now,doesn't it?Well worth owning,and if anyone asks...you can always say,"The devil made ya do it".

I loved this movie. Outstanding in practically every way. Al Pacino's portrayal of Lucifer is exactly how I have always perceived the dark angel to be. The devil does not have horns or a tail, he has the face of man himself. I am always amazed at how the religious zealots seem to conveniently forget that Lucifer was the highest angel, an archangel, thrown out of heaven because of his arrogance and rebelliousness, not because he was a mad demon.

Pacino plays this character beautifully - he is sly, charismatic, chilling, and seductive all at once. One of my favorite scenes was the elevator scene where Milton bates Kevin's mother by calling her "Mrs. Lomax" and asking her slyly that "surely this wasn't her first trip to New York". Absolutely wicked! Then, as Milton casually wisks Kevin off to a night on the town at the Flamingo club and the boxing match (naturally Don King would have an alliance with Satan), I was mezmerized watching Milton weave his spell and reel Kevin smoothly into his web. Pacino's climaxtic argument is brilliant as he exclaims that he's a fan of man and why. As I watched Kevin's descent from Maryann,(Charlize Theron and Keanu had wonderful chemistry as a married couple),I was reminded of how we all make certain decisions then try to justify our actions later, usually with the precursor that, "It wasn't MY fault, it was the work of Satan... then, like Kevin, we make the same decisions over and over.

I thought Keanu Reeves was perfect as the cool, arrogant, hotshot attorney who knows that he is so...good. I am completely baffled by all the haters panning Keanu's acting, he did a great job. I thought the casting of all the actors were on point in this movie, everyone connected with each other and with their characters.

My only complaint is that the deleted scenes cannot not be viewed without the director's commentary. The sub-titles can't even be displayed. While this DVD has one of the best director's commentary's, it would be nice to have the option of watching the deleted scenes on their own since these scenes contribute to the continuity of the story and clear up questions a viewer may have. Overall, this movie is just outstanding!