Charlie Tango is a popcorn movie that you should watch with your friends.
Kim (Stacie Mistysyn) has it all. She is an air traffic controller by day and performs rock cover songs at night. She excels at poker and is well-trusted by her peers. Her husband is a cop who loves her dearly, but she is bored with her life and decides to treat that boredom with a spicy affair with a very shady man named Charlie (David La Haye). Feeling overjoyed by her obviously suspicious lover, she displays absolutely no remorse for her husband despite his efforts to bridge the distance between them, she doesn’t need him or want him anymore- that is until her recklessness at work gets a bunch of people killed.
When a colleague falls ill, Kim volunteers to manage traffic control by herself when there are two flights out at the same time. She is wheeling in her chair back in forth, one pilot to the other. Getting overwhelmed, her actions result in those two plains crashing into each other. At the moment, she is devastated but, when this disaster hits the news and she finds out she is about to face murder charges, Kim decides that ish wasn’t her fault and she’s not about to go down for it.
This movie is absolutely insane in the best way. Mistysyn’s performance as the oblivious narcissist is the definition of IDAF and it is thrilling to watch. Every choice this woman makes is worse than the last; she truly is a chaotic spirit- a middle-aged woman in her baby-girl era you could say. She is in the best shape of her life, rich, rocks out at night, is a card shark and she throws it all away for Charlie and his Ponzi scheme- also to forget she’s on trial for murder.
Kim wondering how her life got so messy.
It’s every decision she makes during this public trial that makes this movie so damn fun to watch. Why? Because her choices have no rhyme or reason; I wouldn’t categorize this as a nervous breakdown because she already showed us at the beginning of the film that she was in the process of blowing up her life. Kim is just a truly awful person yet, as the viewer, you sort of love her for it because it never dawns on her that SHE’S the problem. It never occurs to her that lying to her husband and pulling him into a Ponzi scheme might be wrong. She won’t even talk to the victim’s families because it’s too much for her anxiety.
Charlie is an equally sinister character channelling his inner Bernie Madoff with a really bad hat. This man isn’t just trying to get rich. He is blackmailing the women around him in the worst way- it is not meant to be funny and it’s not in a “ha-ha” way, but in a “WHAT IS THIS MAN DOING” sort of way. In my mind, Mistysyn and La Haye prepared for their roles with one question “Who do you think is crazier?” And from there they made magic because their chemistry was off the charts. I loved watching them be absolutely unhinged together.
There is a power when female characters are not written for their age but instead written for their personhood; Simon Boisvert did this with intention. He wanted to show a layered woman later in life who has not succumbed to the rules of an ageist society. When writers do this it makes movies fun, it makes them exciting and it makes them relatable to everybody.
In addition to the two unpredictable main characters, Boisvert also treats us to a roster of supporting characters that really level the confusion of who is playing who. With each misdirect comes a new mystery and it is a ride to watch Charlie sort of come apart by his schemes because even starts to wonder what is happening around him.
I highly recommend you watch this movie with your friends because it is so much fun and a great mystery thriller. I look forward to more films like this by Simon Boisvert.
Charlie Tango is playing in select theatres now.
