The Devil’s Advocate

Description

Too old for Hamlet and too young for Lear–what’s an ambitious actor to do? Play the Devil, of course. Jack Nicholson did it in The Witches of Eastwick; Robert De Niro did it in Angel Heart (as Louis Cyphre–get it?). In The Devil’s Advocate Al Pacino takes his turn as the great Satan, and clearly relishes his chance to raise hell. He’s a New York lawyer, of course, by the name of John Milton, who recruits a hotshot young Florida attorney (Keanu Reeves) to his firm and seduces him with tempting offers of power, sex and money. Think of the story as a twist on John Grisham’s The Firm, with the corporate evil made even more explicit. Reeves is wooden, and therefore doesn’t seem to have much of a soul to lose, but he’s really just our excuse to meet the devil. Pacino’s the main attraction, gleefully showing off his–and the Antichrist’s–chops at perpetrating menace and mayhem. –Jim Emerson