My World of Flops Case File #191 The Squeeze (1987)
All I really remember about the 1987 flop Michael Keaton vehicle The Squeeze is its infinitely regrettable poster.
The bewildering image depicts poor Michael Keaton being crushed between two buildings in the grips of a hand massive and powerful enough to hold skyscrapers in its meaty paw.
This is no mere hand: it’s a Kaiju-sized extremity able to destroy a towering mass of metal and glass as easily as a child crushing a grape. Even more bewilderingly, Keaton is ALSO the size of a skyscraper, albeit nowhere near as giant as the owner of the hands giving him the big squeeze.
Verily, this is no man! It is a monster! He’s a New York Godzilla with a fluffy mullet and an endless tie with an unconscionable pattern, even by eighties standards.
Look closely at the theatrical poster for The Squeeze, and you can actually see Keaton re-assessing his choice to become a professional actor. Being a movie star is a pretty sweet gig as long as the movie in question is not The Squeeze.
At Keaton’s enormous feet lies the New York skyline but it’s tiny in comparison to the movie star’s body and those bewildering phantom hands of death so there’s nothing to distract the eye from the visceral horror of an eight thousand foot tall Michael Keaton getting crushed by the hands of a god.
This eyesore/train wreck is not improved by the tagline, “The comedy on a lucky streak.” That proved deliciously ironic and staggeringly inaccurate considering that The Squeeze was cursed and clueless at every stage, from conception to completion and then everything after.
What makes the poster for The Squeeze uncanny and downright eerie rather than just unfortunate and ugly are the buildings putting the beloved Beetlejuice star in the big squeeze: the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
That might make sense if the World Trade Center figured prominently in The Squeeze the way it does in the 1976 remake of King Kong. That, however, is perplexingly and perversely not the case.
The Squeeze takes place in New York but there are no scenes at the World Trade Center. The World Trade Center is never even mentioned. Yet the bad, bizarre judgment of a seriously misguided poster designer ensured that this negligible little nothing of an action-comedy would be forever associated with one of the grimmest moments in American history, a formative collective trauma on par with the election of Donald Trump.
We’ll never forget the terrorist attacks of 9/11 but The Squeeze is so thoroughly, even perversely forgettable that in the orgy of nostalgia over the twentieth anniversary of September 11th, 2001 I don’t recall it being mentioned even a single time.
That’s appropriate, since The Squeeze is very much the kind of movie people don’t, and shouldn’t talk about.
A defeated Keaton stars as Harry Berg, a moderately more functional version of the character he played in The Dream Team. Like the protagonist of The Dream Team, he’s a wisecracking, fast-talking smart-ass with the gift of gab and a propensity for telling untruths for personal gain but also out of habit.
He’s a struggling artist who drinks beer for breakfast. His personal and professional lives are a mess. He’s divorced and just barely scraping by creating monstrosities like a massive dinosaur sculpture festooned with television screens for a nightclub with a prehistoric theme.
Harry drinks too much and gambles too much and isn’t good with money or women. He’s ambling sideways through a wasted life when, also like his character in The Dream Team, he becomes mixed up in a murder that keeps pulling him deeper and deeper into the New York underworld.
The frenetic action revolves around a mysterious electromagnetic device that functions as an unusually pure and empty MacGuffin.
The magical black box contains a powerful magnet with the ability to help some unscrupulous souls rig the lottery in their favor. As a Juggalo, I was understandably confused by the plot points involving magnets. I thought about possibly discussing my confusion with a scientist friend, but he can be dishonest and that makes me angry.
In the 1980s and 1990s way too many comedies had diamond-smuggling subplots that did nothing but take up time and lazily recycle formula. The lottery-rigging subplot in The Squeeze reminded me of those weirdly ubiquitous diamond smuggling subplots in its perverse perfunctoriness.
The Squeeze gets off to an agreeable if not particularly promising start that submerges us into what feels like a crass commercial version of the nighttime New York of After Hours.
There’s a spark of inspiration in casting Keaton as a motormouth hustler whose art resembles an even more obvious version of Banksy. Meat Loaf similarly initially makes a strong impression as a hulking henchman who says next to nothing but cultivates an enigmatic aura as a hoodlum who believes in his work, who stands for something beyond crime.
The Squeeze hits a brick wall about a half hour in, however, and never recovers. The ramshackle action-comedy’s thin charm falls apart completely once it makes the move from manic city comedy to frenetic 1980s action movie.
Once The Squeeze becomes a thrill-free thriller the comedy becomes an afterthought yet because The Squeeze is fundamentally a comedy it doesn’t feel particularly committed to action either.
But The Squeeze isn’t just a half-assed comedy and a painfully perfunctory action movie. It’s also a by-the-numbers romance that finds ne’er do well Harry romancing Rachel Dobs (Rae Dawn Chong), an uptight bounty hunter looking to become a detective.
Chong isn’t bad in the thankless role of the love interest but a movie this threadbare needs a bona fide movie star like Keaton in the part to make up for its many shortcomings, narrative, comedic and otherwise.
John Davidson, who I know primarily as the host of the 1980s incarnation of Hollywood Squares, steals the film as the ironically nicknamed Honest Tom T. Murray, a television personality out to make a fortune rigging the lottery.
I half-remember Davidson as a quintessential show-business phony with blindingly white teeth and massive, perfectly coiffed hair. So there’s a distinct element of self-parody at play in his portrayal of the his character as the ultimate empty showman.
Davidson plays the “Honest” Tom as a cross between a more grounded Max Headroom and President Camacho from Idiocracy, a combustible combination of bottomless self-love and vamping.
When John Davidson steals a movie something has gone horribly awry. Indeed almost everything went awry in the making and marketing of The Squeeze, including a stunt that ended in the death of a legendary stuntman.
No one should have to die for the sake of something like The Squeeze. It’s one thing to suffer for your art but The Squeeze barely qualifies as entertainment.
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