Devil has many faces - the terrifying Pacino is one of them

Rating: 7/10 (20 December 1999)

Well. Strange movie. It starts lightly, almost giving the impression that the director new nothing of the real life in a courthouse; it gets better by showing some friction between mother and daughter-in-law...and then it portrays the strange ways of celebrating victory of a couple. Then comes the devily proposal... Now he movie gets frightning, although in some shallow way.
But, as it turns out, after having seen it, when you look at it from a wide angle, this movie becomes quite ordinary. The plot does not surprise you, the intended surprises seemed the work of an amateur writer, who thinks the best shocks come from those things that are supposed to surprise you (wow, the man is his father, wow, that´s his sister, wow, his wife did that, and he did that...). It happens that, nowadays, movie fans do see a lot of movies, from many years, from many directors, and it takes a good plot and good directing to really surprise them.
I foresaw some events quite a few minutes before I was shown them. Possibilly, lots of people saw it that way too. But anyway, this is a good thing to watch.
The acting... Well, Keanu Reeves is good, Charlize Theron is excellent - quite a revelation she is. But the real bomb, the true interest of this movie lies with Al Pacino. This actor is a phenomenon. He can be a gangster, a blind man... and the devil. He is an astonishing actor, one that will endure forever in our memory - like Spencer Tracy, Bogart, Cagney, John Wayne, Douglas, Connery, De Niro, Morgan Freeman, O´Toole. If I was given a choice between having a video-library of these actors and all the special effects and great soundtracks in the world...I would choose the stories personified by these actor´s characters.
Al Pacino alone holds this movie above the average - and they didn´t even give him a great part. Between Pacino´s acting, Reeves´ performance and the revelation named Charlize Theron - and if you choose to consider a grade C+ plot...well, you get a good enough movie.
Too bad it ends in such a poor way - as if someone (the director, the cast, the producer, some big boss in the studio) were trying to rush it to the finishing.