MOVIE REVIEW : NO LIFE OR LAUGHTER LEFT IN ‘THE SQUEEZE’

In the opening scene of “The Squeeze” (citywide), Michael Keaton, who’s having a streak of bad luck at poker but is an incorrigible bluffer, dangles some car keys, offering as collateral a cherry ’69 Fleetwood that we can glimpse through the open door behind him. Alas, in the very next instant the car’s actual owner appears and drives it away.

This gag is good for an honest, though modest, laugh. You better cherish it because it marks the comic high point of this slick, by-the-numbers romantic comedy-thriller that teams Keaton with Rae Dawn Chong only to waste the opportunity.

Keaton is Harry Berg, a free-wheeling New York artist-designer whose ex-wife cons him into picking up a package at her apartment (which contains a deadly secret). Chong is Rachel Dobbs, a scrappy skip tracer ambitious to graduate to full-fledged private eye. She’s after Harry to serve him a summons for back alimony, and as debuting screenwriter Daniel Taplitz’s murky yet simplistic plot has it, she ends up pursuing that package as well. It contains an ultra-powerful electromagnetic device with which a passel of bad guys, including a sweaty psychopath played by Meat Loaf, intend to rig a giant lotto offering a $56-million prize.

The point of Harry and Rachel’s relationship is that she is a square shooter whose impact upon him is to get him to stop cutting corners and straighten up and fly right--and that this happens while they’re up to their necks in adventure and therefore have no time to realize they’re falling in love. This is a piece of cake for Keaton and Chong, who have plenty of wit and sparkle, but we don’t much care, thanks to the glum circumstances.

“The Squeeze” owes its inspiration entirely to old movies rather than to life, and it doesn’t help that there’s no lightness in the steady, get-on-with-it approach of director Roger Young, a TV veteran whose last feature was the similarly mundane “Lassiter.”

Because “The Squeeze” is so stale, its people and its incidents are continually upstaged by grandiose settings. For example, Harry’s vast loft in an old railroad station, in which he’s constructing a giant neon-trimmed dinosaur out of old TV set parts--and incorporating 64 working TV sets in it--for a disco. Production designer Simon Waters calls it a “video creation . . . a primordial beast encrusted with the refuse of today’s technological society,” but what all this means for the movie, except for a big dent in the budget, remains obscure.

Similarly, the film climaxes spectacularly aboard an aircraft carrier where a pompadoured, red-suited John Davidson is holding the giant lotto for a cheering audience of 2,500. This sequence is heavily caricatured, but it doesn’t mean much because the lotto hasn’t heretofore been established as a symbol of greed. Worst of all, it isn’t entirely clear who’s behind the scam on its upper levels. The kingpin seems to be the suave Rigaud (Ronald Guttman), whose sleek office is in yet another abandoned railroad terminal, but Davidson’s deliciously unctuous Honest Tom T. Murray is apparently also involved. We need to have spent more time with them to understand what’s going on.

Keaton’s Harry is a smart aleck who’s a good guy underneath the brashness, which means that Keaton has played him before, and Chong’s Rachel is not much of a stretch for her either. They make a lively and endearing team, but you wish you were watching them in something other than “The Squeeze” (rated PG-13 for standard thriller violence).

‘THE SQUEEZE’ A Tri-Star release of a Tri-Star-ML Delphi Premier production. Executive producers Harry Colomby, David Shamroy Hamburger. Producers Rupert Hitzig, Michael Tannen. Director Roger Young. Screenplay Daniel Taplitz. Camera Arthur Albert. Music Miles Goodman. Production designer Simon Waters. Costumes Jane Greenwood. Associate producers James Chory, Gayle Scott. Stunt coordinator Victor Magnotta. Film editor Harry Keramidas. With Michael Keaton, Rae Dawn Chong, Joe Pantoliano, Meat Loaf, John Davidson, Leslie Bevis, George Gerdes, Liane Langland, Ronald Guttman, Richard Portnow.

Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children under 13).