Dispassionate nonsense

Rating: Null/10 (19 August 1999)

Once in a while, there comes a film that simply tries too hard to do whatever it was intended to do. The Devil's Advocate is one such film. It tries hard to be a brooding, chilling tale of the evils of greed and heartlessness that plague modern society, but it eventually fails in the end.
While the movie attempts to characterize Kevin Lomax as a brash, young hotshot attorney who has his priorities to his family and friends turned awry, it does not manage to further the point effectively. Instead, for much of the movie we see an insufferable hothead who will stop at nothing to win his cases, even at the expense of the relationship with his wife.
The movie also tries to further exactly how evil Al Pacino is, through various scenes of grisly murder and implied sexual encounters. However, the violence comes across as excessive and the sexuality is best represented by a truly gratuitous nude scene involving Charlize Theron. All this is heaped on to make John Milton look like an evil force, but succeeds only in making stomachs churn. It also dilutes any potential moral message that the screenplay tries to convey in shallow, mind-numbing acts of cruelty.
While the Devil's Advocate seems to tug at the moral fabric that binds humanity, it sacrifices any redeeming content to its audience through overly extreme uses of graphic adult themes. The only thing it manages to do well is be a movie of nice little spots dotted here and there in various scenes that would please the mildly perverted movie watcher among us.