196) Who? (1973) Dir: Jack Gold Date Released: August XX, 1975 Date Seen: June 22, 2012 Rating: 3.5/5
197) The Devil and Max Devlin (1981) Dir: Steven Hilliard Stern Date Released: March 6, 1981 Date Seen: June 22, 2012 Rating: 2/5
I had a couple of Elliott Gould movies lying around and felt like watching them. I love a good double feature and thought this could be fun. Eh, not that fun, actually, mostly because the latter film is a joy-less Disney film that is not nearly as fun as it should be. The set piece where Elliott Gould goes to hell is surreal and vivid. But: Bill Cosby, who plays a demon (he's not exactly the Devil, but it's assumed that he's a very important devil), has no good lines; the film devotes an annoying amount of time to child actors that aren't that talented; and Gould is totally wasted, too.
On top of that, Who? only features Elliott Gould: it's not really an Elliott Gould movie. Jack Gold's adaptation is a fun, if largely undistinguished and dramatically inert, spy/scifi hybrid in which Gould interrogates a cyborg that claims to be an American scientist that mysteriously went missing. Gould's basically just a secondary character in this scenario. He grills the cyboerg scientist until the robot-man reconsiders his foundational, apolitical love of scientific discovery--and becomes a farmer? Wait, am I remembering this right? I am? Oh. Hm.
I like Who?, mostly it has a bizarre premise and features some neat flashbacks, shot from the first-person perspective of our cyborg scientist protagonist. But yeah, The Devil and Max Devlin's just kinda lame.
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