The Devil's Advocate

The Architecture of Sin

In the late 1990s, the American legal thriller was a comfortable commodity, usually involving a plucky underdog lawyer dismantling a corrupt system. Taylor Hackford’s *The Devil’s Advocate* (1997) took this popular framework and inverted it with operatic cruelty. It posits that the system is not merely corrupt but cosmically ordained to be so, and the lawyer is not the hero, but the willing vessel of his own damnation. Viewed nearly three decades later, Hackford’s film transcends its genre trappings to become a scorching critique of modern narcissism, suggesting that the ultimate evil isn’t a cloven-hoofed beast, but the reflection in our own bathroom mirror.

Hackford constructs the film’s visual language around the seductive geometry of power. When hotshot Florida attorney Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves) arrives in New York, the camera abandons the warm, humid intimacy of the South for the cold, monumental scale of Manhattan. The cinematography by Andrzej Bartkowiak treats the law firm’s headquarters not as an office, but as a cathedral of commerce. The spaces are too large, the ceilings too high, and the light too golden—a visual representation of the "high places" where temptation traditionally occurs.



The film’s horror lies not in jump scares, but in the slow erosion of the human soul amidst this architectural grandeur. The narrative brilliance of *The Devil’s Advocate* is that Kevin Lomax is never truly possessed. He is merely nudged. Al Pacino, delivering a performance of Shakespearean ferocity as John Milton, operates less as a monster and more as a venture capitalist of human frailty. He understands that the most effective trap for a man like Kevin—a man undefeated in the courtroom—is the fear of losing. The supernatural elements are secondary to the terrifyingly mundane reality that Kevin chooses his career over his conscience repeatedly, long before the devil reveals his face.

This choice claims its first and most tragic victim in Mary Ann, played with heartbreaking vulnerability by a young Charlize Theron. While Kevin is intoxicated by the firm’s prestige, Mary Ann is the canary in the coal mine, sensitive to the sulfurous rot beneath the gilding. Her descent into madness is the film’s emotional anchor, transforming what could have been a campy thriller into a tragedy. Hackford uses her isolation in their cavernous apartment to illustrate the cost of Kevin’s ambition; she is sacrificed on the altar of his winning streak.



The climax of the film, a fiery confrontation in Milton’s penthouse, strips away the legal procedural veneer to engage in a theological debate that feels strikingly modern. Pacino’s monologue regarding God as an "absentee landlord" is captivating because it weaponizes humanism against divinity. He argues that he is the only force that truly accepts humanity’s flawed nature. However, the film’s true punchline is its ending. The "reset" button that sends Kevin back to the start, only to fall prey to his vanity all over again, suggests a cynical, cyclical view of history.

Ultimately, *The Devil’s Advocate* is a parable about the inability of the modern ego to recognize its own limits. It remains a potent piece of cinema not because of its special effects, which have aged, but because of its central thesis: we don't need the devil to destroy us; we are perfectly capable of doing it ourselves, provided we are given enough applause.