Keanu Reeves Replaced Another Hollywood Legend In The Devil's Advocate

Your honor, I must confess — I have a mighty big soft spot for "The Devil's Advocate." The 1997 supernatural courtroom thriller stars Keanu Reeves as Kevin Lomax, a hotshot Florida lawyer (with the world's sketchiest Southern accent) who is recruited by a fiendish defense attorneys office in New York, run by the charismatic and slightly terrifying John Milton (Al Pacino). As he abandons his morals in order to win cases, Kevin's wife Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) starts having horrific visions with demonic influences. You see, Milton isn't just devilishly handsome and talented, he's also actually the devil himself.

"The Devil's Advocate" completely hinges on Pacino's performance, as he plays Milton with a kind of outlandish delight that only a rare few of our greatest actors could ever attempt. It's a little bit Tony Montana from "Scarface" when he's on copious amounts of coke and a little bit Lieutenant Hanna from "Heat," all wrapped up in some deliciously decadent camp. The surrounding performances are important too, however, and Reeves is often quite innocent and confused, a lamb among wolves. His performance perfectly bounces against Pacino's high intensity theatricality (much like Reeves and Gary Oldman in "Bram Stoker's Dracula"). As such, it's hard to imagine that once upon a time, a very different 90's heartthrob almost played the increasingly amoral attorney.

According to an Al Pacino interview with the Los Angeles Times from 1997, "The Devil's Advocate" spent a fair amount of time stuck in development hell. "The Lost Boys" director Joel Schumacher was set to call the shots at one point, with Brad Pitt in the role of Kevin Lomax instead of Keanu Reeves. Ultimately, though, Schumacher couldn't find the right actor to play the devil and Pacino even passed on an initial draft of the screenplay by "Showdown in Little Tokyo" scribe Jonathan Lemkin, feeling that the character was something he'd already seen too many times before. For sure, while Schumacher is fantastic at directing a certain kind of camp (like the fabulously campy and queer "Batman Forever"), it's almost impossible to imagine his version of "The Devil's Advocate."

It is slightly easier to picture Pitt in the Lomax role, however, especially considering the kinds of roles he was taking in the mid-1990s. His world-weary young cop character in David Fincher's "Seven" isn't all that different from Lomax, and Pitt had the charisma to pull off the courtroom scenes. Then again, he might have come across as a little too smart to have fallen for the devil's tricks, whereas Reeves' natural naivety helps make the movie work.

Say what you will about Reeves' occasionally ridiculous accent, but he's absolutely perfect in "The Devil's Advocate." He's sweet and lost, an innocent in a world of villains, and he serves as the perfect audience proxy because we can put ourselves so readily into his shoes. There's a reason that "The Devil's Advocate" ranks among our best Keanu Reeves movies of all time as well as our best Al Pacino movies of all time; it's simply one hell of a movie and its two main performances are vital to its greatness. Supporting performances by Connie Nielsen, Tamara Tunie, Chris Bauer, Craig T. Nelson, and Charlize Theron (whose performance convinced Patty Jenkins to cast her in "Monster") all help sell this bizarre and bloody courtroom drama that raises the stakes to an apocalyptic battle between Heaven and Hell.

"The Devil's Advocate" is one of those 1990s movies that could never really happen today, and that's in large part because of its absolutely perfect cast. Pitt ended up doing just fine without it, starring in the similarly named but wildly different Irish terrorism thriller "The Devil's Own" the same year. I guess 1997 was the year for devilish titles at the cinema, but we were all better off for it.