Dostoevsky and The Devil’s Advocate

I recently rewatched The Devil’s Advocate, that devilishly over-the-top 90s legal thriller where Keanu Reeves makes deals with Satan himself, played by Al Pacino, who chews up every scene like a man on a mission. As the movie’s climax unfolded, when Pacino’s John Milton confronts Keanu’s increasingly desperate Kevin Lomax, I couldn’t shake the feeling that their confrontation mirrored a famous scene from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

If you’ve read Dostoevsky—specifically the “Devil” chapter, where Ivan Karamazov is visited by a mocking, world-weary devil—you know what I mean. In the movie, Pacino’s devil isn’t a cartoonish villain. He comes across as urbane, witty, and almost relatable. He banters, seduces, and challenges just like Ivan’s hallucinated devil, who shows up in a shabby suit and spends an entire chapter needling Ivan about philosophy, morality, and the secret pleasures of evil.

Then Pacino delivers that unforgettable line: “I love humanity!” In that moment, I wasn’t just watching a legal drama. I was hearing echoes of Ivan’s devil, who also claims a kind of ironic affection for humanity. Both devils see humans as tragic and fascinating, sometimes worthy of mockery, sometimes deserving a perverse kind of admiration. They are fascinated with us in the way a scientist might be fascinated by a mouse in a maze.

I should be clear. I don’t think The Devil’s Advocate is a direct adaptation of Dostoevsky’s chapter. There’s nothing in the movie’s credits or in interviews that suggests the filmmakers or the original novelist, Andrew Neiderman, meant to recreate Ivan’s existential fever dream. The movie draws mainly from Milton’s Paradise Lost and follows the conventions of a legal thriller.
Even so, the parallels are hard to miss. Dostoevsky’s devil is not just a supernatural boogeyman. He is an intellectual adversary who feeds and exploits Ivan’s doubts and his hunger for meaning. Similarly, Pacino’s John Milton is not simply a villain. He is a philosophical provocateur who weaponizes both logic and temptation. Both devils hold up a mirror to their protagonists and force them to face the ugliest parts of themselves.

The moment when Pacino says he loves humans (unlike God), really made it click for me. It is a sardonic, twisted refrain from devils who see themselves as misunderstood antiheroes. They are as much a part of us as our ambitions and our rationalizations. Whether they are needling a Russian intellectual or an ambitious southern lawyer, their appeal isn’t just to our sins but to our sense of self-importance.

So next time you watch The Devil’s Advocate, remember this. Sometimes the most chilling devils are the ones who sound a little too much like us. Maybe, just maybe, they owe a little something to old Dostoevsky.