The Devil's Advocate

There’s a simple, stubborn engine at the heart of The Devil's Advocate: Kevin Lomax, a small-town Florida defence lawyer who never loses. That unbeaten streak — and the way Lomax prizes victory above pretty much everything else — is the film’s magnetic core.

Everything that follows is a reaction to that appetite. A controversial courtroom win brings Kevin to a Manhattan law firm run by John Milton, and the offer that arrives is less like a job and more like a proposition: professional validation in exchange for steady moral compromise.

That bargain — the Faustian trade-off between success and conscience — is what makes Taylor Hackford’s 1997 hybrid of legal thriller and supernatural horror worth revisiting. It’s not just plot mechanics; it’s a picture of what happens when talent meets temptation.

The setup is economical: Kevin Lomax is an undefeated young lawyer whose courtroom success draws attention. That record — and the tactics behind it — lead to an invitation to join a powerful Manhattan firm.

Accepting the job moves the story from provincial victories to high-stakes corporate law, and with that move comes a clear dramatic friction: professional ambition pushing against ethical obligation, and a wife whose life is disrupted by the relocation.

Milton, the firm's owner, doesn’t simply hand out work; he operates by rhetorical seduction. He supplies opportunity while slowly undermining Kevin’s moral anchors, which keeps the central conflict taut without constant exposition.

Late in the screenplay the film leans into the supernatural: the firm’s shadowy genealogy and an Antichrist plot thread become explicit, turning the legal-thriller setup into something overtly uncanny as the stakes escalate.

Kevin Lomax isn’t memorable because of a single heroic move; he’s memorable because of a repeated habit. He chooses winning, again and again, even when the price is clearly dragging him off-course.

That compulsion to be validated professionally makes him easy to read and hard to forgive: his choices drive the plot and force the film to keep asking whether success is worth what you must give up to obtain it.

Kevin’s move to New York also works as a pressure test for his marriage. Mary Ann’s worsening isolation and breakdown aren’t window dressing — they’re the emotional counterweight to his legal compromises, reflecting how ambition can corrode domestic life.

And because the film lets Milton work on Kevin slowly — through rhetoric, praise and position — Kevin’s role becomes less about individual scenes and more about a temperament under sustained trial. That’s the character detail that keeps the film honest.

Contemporary critics made no secret of what grabbed them most: Al Pacino’s John Milton is the sort of performance reviewers circle with a highlighter. It’s described repeatedly as flamboyant and scene-dominating.

That showpiece quality matters because Milton functions as the film’s active tempter. When a character needs to be persuasive — to reframe ethical terms and make compromise sound rational — the performance’s larger-than-life presence sells that idea.

So the question isn’t whether Milton is subtle; it’s whether the performance makes his rhetorical seduction credible. The contemporary reaction suggests it did, turning Milton into the persuasive centre that draws Kevin deeper.

Put differently: if the movie is an argument about temptation, Pacino’s portrayal is its loudest voice. The film often relies on that volume to make the bargain feel inevitable.

On paper the movie is a legal thriller with supernatural decoration. Underneath, it’s a film about bargains: what people trade when they value success above conscience.

That Faustian deal — career advancement in exchange for moral compromise — is the repeated hinge. Kevin’s decisions show how ambition can bend principles until what once looked like a defence becomes a kind of complicity.

Rhetoric plays a key role. Milton doesn’t bully so much as reframe; temptation here is intellectual and seductive, an argument dressed as opportunity rather than a cartoonish evil snapping its fingers.

There’s also the corruption of power and the domestic fallout. As Kevin climbs, marriage and mental health fray; the film stages ambition and conscience not only as abstract opposites but as pressures with real human costs.

Taylor Hackford assembled a crew with clear genre instincts: Andrzej Bartkowiak on cinematography, Mark Warner editing and Bruno Rubeo on production design. Those credits read like a team built to keep a drama feeling big without losing the thriller mechanics.

The film’s construction supports the tone shifts — from courtroom set pieces to the creeping, almost operatic horror that arrives later — by leaning on craftsmen who could anchor both realism and spectacle.

Production credits also point to a studio-backed scale: producers such as Arnon Milchan and the Kopelsons suggest the film was positioned as a sizeable 1997 release, not a small offbeat exercise.

All of which matters because the movie asks viewers to accept both legal-thriller beats and late-stage supernatural reveals. The production crew gives the film enough solidity for that leap to feel intentional rather than accidental.

The movie’s final, transformational moments weren’t left purely to computer trickery. Rick Baker is credited as the special make-up effects artist, which signals a hands-on approach to the film’s physical grotesqueries.

Production work on those climactic transformations used life masks — material repurposed from earlier work — as part of the sculptural effects, blending tactile craft with visual compositing.

A striking sequence involving an animated ‘statue’ was assembled by filming performers in a water tank against blue screen and then compositing those plates into the sculpture effect. The sequence reportedly took months and was a sizeable slice of the effects budget.

Those practical steps matter because they give the movie a physical, tactile quality in its late moments: something made as much in the workshop as in the edit bay.

The film lands squarely at a late-1990s intersection: it borrows the corporate-law mechanics that dominated Grisham-era thrillers and then layers on overt occult elements that push it towards horror.

Critics at the time noticed that blend. The movie trades on the era’s fascination with white-collar power and courtroom manoeuvre, and then deliberately contaminates that world with supernatural stakes.

That hybrid identity is part of why it felt distinct in 1997: a legal-thriller engine running into genre escalation rather than simply resolving as another court-room morality play.

Seen in context, the movie reads like a product of its moment — one foot in the decade’s courtroom drama trend, the other in late-90s appetite for big, moralising spectacle.

If you’re thinking back to other films from the decade, The Devil's Advocate sits beside the Grisham-style courtroom dramas of the 1990s — it borrows their corporate-law setting and high-stakes deals before twisting the genre into something occult.

It’s not a straight sequel to those firm dramas; it’s more of a cousin that decided to wear a different hat halfway through.

For viewers who enjoyed the tension of legal manoeuvres in 1990s thrillers, this one offers a familiar engine with an unfamiliar destination.

The film carries a tangible afterlife in genre circles: it won the Saturn Award for Best Horror Film for its production year, which is an explicit nod to how it sat between thriller and horror.

Al Pacino’s John Milton continued to be a focus of pop-culture discussion and nominations — for example, a recorded MTV Movie Award Best Villain nomination — which indicates how the performance stuck in people’s heads.

Retrospectives and reappraisals tend to return to two points: Pacino’s showpiece turn and the movie’s hybrid identity, the way it melds legal-thriller scaffolding with overtly supernatural storytelling.

That combination — an attention-grabbing lead and a genre-crossing appetite — is why the film still finds a place in conversations about 1990s cinema rather than being quietly forgotten.