"Devil's Advocate" (18) Nationwide
Ranking as they do somewhere between journalists and pond slime in the affections of the American public, lawyers were bound to be depicted at some point as the brood of the devil, and they get the full treatment in this well-crafted and enjoyably silly entertainment from journeyman director Taylor Hackford (An Officer And A Gentleman). In a modern-day version of Faust, Keanu Reeves plays a young Southern district attorney lured into joining a wealthy New York legal firm by the devilishly attractive inducements of Al Pacino. Accompanied by his beautiful young wife (Charlize Theron), Reeves moves into the company-owned apartment block overlooking Central Park (shades of Rosemary's Baby) and devotes himself body and soul to his new employer, but it slowly - a little too slowly for most tastes - becomes clear that there's more to this particular job than meets the eye. Theron becomes emotionally disturbed by the strange goings-on behind the scenes, while Reeves falls increasingly under the spell of the charismatic Pacino.
Like his contemporaries Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson in Angel Heart and The Witches Of Eastwick respectively, Pacino grasps the opportunity to ham it up as a modern Old Nick, revelling in the wicked ways of the modern world. "This is my century!", he exults during one of his many over-the-top monologues, ramming the point home - subtlety is not an option here. But, after a long string of wretched performances, Reeves is surprisingly competent as the fresh-faced attorney, and the little-known Theron acquits herself well. It's certainly no masterpiece, but Devil's Advocate is actually a lot more fun than all those turgid John Grisham adaptations of recent years, especially The Firm, to which it bears more than a passing resemblance. It is half an hour too long, however, and badly let down by a banal ending.
"An American Werewolf In Paris" (15) Nationwide
Sixteen years is a long time to wait for a sequel, but not long enough if the result is as awful as this shambolic effort from Anthony Waller, who made a promising debut with the effective low-budget thriller Mute Witness a couple of years ago. John Landis's witty and scary An American Werewolf In London was a genuinely original film, stuffed with clever ideas, good gags and inventive special effects.
On the surface, the sequel follows the same template - naive American students on vacation in a foreign land find themselves bloodily embroiled in matters lycanthropic - but there the resemblance ends. Waller's film is deeply unfunny, has no interesting characters and shows none of the sense of place that the original had - this is picture-postcard Paris, lazily and hastily drawn. Incredibly, even the special effects are less impressive than Rick Baker's 1981 creations, and the music soundtrack - one of the delights of the first film - is grim in the extreme. Tom Everett Scott, last seen as the engaging hero of Tom Hanks's That Thing You Do, tries and fails to cope with the terrible script, while poor Julie Delpy looks deeply embarrassed by the whole thing.
