Milton recruits Lomax, seducing him with money, a lavish apartment and a corporate setting that looks like the digs of a Renaissance doge, complete with hot and hotter running bimbos. Lomax manfully tries to resist the bimbos, but he can’t resist Milton, whose vast office contains a huge, blazing fireplace, who speaks all languages, who travels only on the subway (underground, get it?). Well, long before poor Lomax has gotten it, everyone in the audience knows that Milton is the Devil. Even his name is a devilish gag. Don’t these Southern boys take English lit? John Milton wrote ““Paradise Lost,’’ the epic of warfare between God and Satan. Meanwhile, Lomax’s wife, Mary Ann (Charlize Theron), is getting sicker and sicker as she senses the encroaching evil.

James Newton Howard’s score clangs and bangs, smiting you with ponderous sonic clues to the satanic situation, and Andrezej Bartkowiak’s cinematography turns New York into a hell that’s erupted into a high-rise parody of heaven. In the climactic face-off, Lomax and Milton engage in a verbal duel that itself is a parody of ““Paradise Lost.’’ Written with brio and staged rousingly by director Taylor Hackford, this confrontation is good, kitschy fun. Milton proclaims that lawyers are the new Antichrist army who defend human evil, ““winning acquittal after acquittal until the stench rises’’ to overwhelm virtue. The film ends with a double switcheroo, a cop-out that cops out again. But how can you hate a movie that casts litigators as the new legions of Lucifer?

Pacino hasn’t had such fun since he exposed the devilish doings among New York cops in ““Serpico.’’ But the new news is Charlize Theron, a 22-year-old South African-born actress who made a knockout debut as a hit woman in the noirish ““2 Days in the Valley.’’ As sexy as Stone, as beautiful as Pfeiffer, Theron has a spontaneity and pure screen presence that says ““star’’ with every breath she takes. I mean, Keanu Reeves is a star, right? There’s his name, above Pacino’s name in the credits! He must have one of those Luciferian lawyers.