Devil's Advocate VHS VHS Widescreen DVD

My roomie ordered it from PPV.

It wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared.  I don't dislike Keanu nearly as much as some.  He seems competent to me, though I can't think of any stellar roles.  His biggest problem is picking bad movies, like Johnny Mnemonic and Chain Reaction.

The movie really stretched verisimilitude.  First, Keanu's character is a lawyer with perfect acquittal rate, 64 straight.  Later we learned that he was also undefeated as a prosecutor.  Uh, no.  But not a fatal problem for the movie.   It does explain why the big New York firm would go for him, thus setting up the seduction.  But the lawyer seduction in The Firm worked much better.

One big problem is that we can't tell who's in on the Big Secret and who isn't.   Was the voodoo guy?  Was the managing partner?  Were the homeless guys puppets or were they simply criminal opportunists?  We know the two chicks are, but how about the other chicks in the elevator?  That knowledge isn't strictly necessary for the story, but it made it hard to follow for me.  We have two levels of Bad Guy that have very different purposes to the plot, and the uncertainty was distracting.

But the biggest plot gap was the murderer's secretary.  We end up learning that she wasn't sleeping with him.  So why did she lie?  Did she know about the step-daughter?  Was it money?  That was a huge hole in the secondary plot that bothered me until the end of the movie.

Finally, the end was over-done.  Pacino gets his signature Big Speech, and it goes on way too long.  They tried to fit in too many pithy lines.  Up until then, I liked his Devil character.

At the very end, Keanu  remembers, and we see that he's going through it again from a different angle.  But won't he see it coming this time?  And will he remember both seductions the next time?  The second should be shorter, because he already knows the out.

Charlize was definitely the high point of this movie.  Second high point is implying that lawyers are the Devil's seed :-)

Not a horrible movie, but a lot of holes.  On my brother's Total Movie Value Scale, rates Cable with Popcorn and Drinks.

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