The Squeeze

The Squeeze joins Adventures in Babysitting and Innerspace as comic adventures, shrewdly fashioned for the summer season. All three movies are oddly inconsequential, all basically superficial. But The Squeeze at least has some darker elements in it, and a little more at stake for its characters.

Michael Keaton plays a lowlife character – some sort of visual artist, I think, though the film isn’t quite clear – who lives in a Manhattan junk-barn and is suffering through a lifelong streak of bad luck. He’s just managing to avoid a bill collector (Rae Dawn Chong) when his ex-wife (Liane Langland) gets him involved in a complicated murder case.

It leads to a mysterious black box that has something to do with fixing the state lottery game. Keaton has spent his life with an eye on the main chance, and hanging onto the box may be his best shot at scoring big, if his conscience, in the form of the bill collector, doesn’t get in the way.

The story (it’s writer Daniel Taplitz’s first screenplay) is rather complicated, and actually not that arresting. In many ways The Squeeze is a failure, particularly in its ability to stay interesting for all of its two hours.

But director Roger Young, who has worked a lot in television and made the Tom Selleck movie Lassiter a few years back, has a way of making scenes work even when they shouldn’t. There’s a laid-back realism in some of the scenes between Keaton and Chong, when they seem less like movie characters than real, hard-luck people.

And Young enjoys revving up a bit, as in the garish disco that’s dominated by one of Keaton’s artworks, a large electronic dinosaur dotted with televisions; or in the finale, which takes place among much hoopla surrounding a lottery drawing on board an aircraft carrier (John Davidson does some generous self-parody as the unctuous host of the lottery drawing).

There’s also good supporting work by Ronald Guttman, who plays the dark intelligence behind the lottery scam; he entices Chong into the thickening plot by spinning stories about mysteries, murder, and non-existent Bulgarian spies. And singer Meat Loaf makes a vivid impression as a thug who dies impaled on a mock-up of the Empire State Building. His last words to Chong, “I could’ve loved you,” make an eerie goodbye.

The Squeeze comes up short, like those other summer movies, in finding that level of enchantment that can make this brand of comic adventure memorable. But it seemed to me the more adult effort, and with a stronger heart at its core.

First published in The Herald, July 1987

A forgotten film, it seems. Young (not to be confused with Robert M. Young) went back mostly to TV work after this. I guess Meat Loaf’s demise qualifies as a spoiler, but people were not quite as strict about those things in the 80s. This was getting toward the end of Rae Dawn Chong’s very pleasant run during the decade, which seemed to portend even bigger things.