The devil has a son...called Kevin

Rating: 3/10 (28 November 2012)

This film is truly an oddity. There's the usual series of gruesome deaths lifted from The Omen and many another supernatural yarn accompanied by the now standard choral music. There's nothing much in the way of originality about any of this, but it does at least hold the attention.
The most interesting thing are the bravura speeches from the villain John Milton (AKA The Devil) delivered with great gusto by Al Pacino, but some of the gravitas is undermined by his son's rather bathetic name 'Kevin'. 'Beelzebub and Kevin' does not quite have a demonic ring to it.
The formulaic script is written more for melodramatic impact than sense, with people wandering onto busy roads for no apparent reason only to be mowed down by cars and such like. One strange and inexplicable scene has a blood drenched Kevin after just seeing his wife die by slitting her own throat meet his mother. Rather than her saying "why are you covered in blood, Kevin?" or "My God! what happened to my daughter-in-law?" instead she launches into a longwinded exposition (but one telegraphed at least an hour earlier in the film) that Milton is his father.
All this is gory and faintly ludicrous but is carried out with Hollywood slickness and would perhaps deserve a better score were it not for the unforgivable finale where this house of cards collapses.
Kevin is tempted to join his satanic father by having sex with his own sister. Instead of this Kevin chooses to shoot himself at which point any sense the script had disappears. Kevin's sister for some unexplained reason dies. The devil's (and the emperor's new) clothes fall off, he starts to burn while shouting "No! No!" The only way this comically bad scene could have been improved would have been to have Pacino say,
"HE'S NOT THE ANTICHRIST! HE'S A VERY NAUGHTY BOY!"
All this makes little sense dramatically or theologically. How can you defeat the devil by committing suicide? Isn't that expressly forbidden in the scriptures?
Still you could argue that the point is that Kevin makes an act of self-sacrifice and had it ended there it perhaps would not have been so bad.
BUT THEN HE WAKES UP!
Seriously, he is then back at the very start of the film before any of the bad stuff happened. In other words the whole thing was an extended dream sequence. This is the sort of thing that first year English students are told to avoid.
To cap it all Kevin then refuses to defend his client, something than is strangely presented as a moral stance when it is actually morally and legally dubious. Isn't it a lawyer's duty to defend his client even if he knows his client is guilty?
A pointless re-appearance of Al Pacino right at the end just adds to the incoherence.