Monday, September 22, 2014

The Devil’s Advocate Movie Review




It’s ironic how experiencing heaven on Earth may lead you straight to hell”.

The Devil’s Advocate opens a supernaturally thrilling window to the story of Kevin Lomax, a defense attorney from Gainesville, Florida whose handsome record as attorney remains to be stainless and untouched by botched cases. Ever since he began practicing his profession, he has been known to have a great mind for lawyering. The movie quickly throws this message to the audience as at its exposition, Kevin Lomax defensively represents a schoolteacher charged with child molestation in the court. He, by all means, knows his client is guilty and that the case is hopeless. But, in wanting to preserve his unbeaten record, Lomax exploits his lawyering prowess as he turns things around, gets everyone to bite into his logic, wins the vote of the jury and nails the case. Immediately, it spreads to be the talk of town. Due to this streak, Kevin is offered, with very tempting lucrative benefits, to work for a prestigious international law firm named Milton, Chadwick and Waters by a representative whom he meets at a bar while celebrating. Vulnerable to worldly delights, Lomax welcomes this invitation and accepts the offer despite the warnings from his Evangelical Christian mother about big city life. Since then, a lot has happened to him and his wife, Mary Ann. From a small Florida loft to an impressive New York apartment complex, he and his wife get quickly intoxicated with the relishing life of wealth, sex, power and other worldly stuff. As the movie progresses toward its end mark, it slowly dawns on him that his personal mentor, John Milton, is Satan in human skin and that all the wealth and power he was enjoying are all his deceptive temptations.

Something compels me to say that the presence of Kevin Lomax and all that he’s gone through in the movie supplies a cinematic support to one of my favorite adages, “It’s ironic how experiencing heaven on Earth may lead you straight to hell”. And this induced me to look upon this movie using a Christian eye.

It does not really take a sophisticated logic to pick up what the entirety of the movie tries to suggest. What it attempts to deliver is simple: that earning the world may mean losing your soul. The movie is a wonderful resource of must-learn Christian values in a not-so Christian way of telling. I have noticed that getting to the end of the movie would mean witnessing tremendous amount of sexual content including odious explicit sexual acts, a number of nude scenes and add to that a ton of profanity, violence, and occult references. That is the downside of watching the movie, I admit. But if you keep an open mind and couple it with rational thinking while watching the movie, you would come to realize how it tries to maintain some very important lessons in tact amidst plenty atrocious insides. The movie moves along for like an hour or so to place strong emphasis on the reality of sin and its consequences. This exposes the bleak world that awaits those who choose to get off the Godly path for some worldly delights. This movie gives warnings to the worldly by littering its content with true human vanity, discontentment, greediness and selfish hunger for power. If we stop looking at its surface and begin digging, we sure would understand what the movie truly has for its aim which is to make all souls on earth, both the healthy and the anemic, to bear witness to the existence of bleak and miserable basket awaiting to catch all of the fallen.

I know there are plenty of commercial pagan movies out there waiting for us to buy into their stuff. But, I have to say this one’s different by wide margin. Others have no moral center as they twist and blow things up but this one has. It may seem crowded out by tremendous amount of heinous contents I was mentioning but it’s there.