Charlie Tango
Written and Directed by Simon Boisvert
Starring David La Haye, Stacie Mistysyn, and Bruce Dinsmore
Unrated
Runtime: 98 minutes
Available to stream September 3

by Susan Keiser, Staff Writer

“There’s a cloud over you right now. It’s casting a shadow over everything … and especially over us.”

Charlie Tango asks the question: what if a low-budget cable TV plane crash documentary series like Air Disasters were turned into an even lower budget erotic thriller? Simon Boisvert combines the two seemingly disparate genres into something with much lower stakes than you would hope for a movie like this.

Stacie Mistysyn (Degrassi Junior High, Degrassi) stars as Kim Miller, a nightclub singer/air traffic controller who by fate and a co-worker’s cold finds herself handling three flights at once at an airport of indeterminate size, and succeeds in getting two of them to land. After the third flight crashes into a jumbo jet, killing five people, Kim’s boyfriend Charlie (David La Haye, Water Child) convinces her to join his “real estate investment company”, which, needless to say, is a pyramid scheme. It’s easy to see where this is going, how Kim’s cop husband Jeff (Bruce Dinsmore, who voiced Binky and Mr. Read on TV’s Arthur!) will investigate the con in a rather convoluted manner, and how it ultimately doesn’t matter what happens to anyone. There are twists and turns, from drug-addled lesbian sex to real estate listings that don’t exist to a “health scare” (re: impotence) that turns into a flimsy alibi. It’s cheesy fun, but cheesy fun can only get you so far, even when the weirder aspects of the plot come into play.

Charlie Tango takes a while for it to veer into batshit territory, but when it does, it goes full throttle, and the main and supporting cast are sure to make the most of it. There’s Charlie’s other mistress Tiffany (Diana Lewis), a cross between Jennifer Coolidge and Aileen Wournous with a weird robotic dog in tow, as well as Charlie’s wife, Wanda (Genevieve StLouis), who is more upset about her husband losing three million dollars than the fact that he’s cheating on her with two different women, and even then she doesn’t seem too mad. This is Stacy Mistysyn’s first on-screen performance in over fifteen years, and as Kim, she’s pretty good with the material she has, and with making her almost irredeemable character a bit human.

The production design is limited due to budget constraints but it also seems as though Boisvert could have made a different, better film around these limitations. Despite the tension and grief we’re supposed to feel in the midst of Kim’s situation, the bright cinematography makes it feel as though this film noir takes place almost entirely during a Sunday afternoon or two. The climactic crash at the beginning all takes place off-screen, with the stock footage (of a Boeing 777, a 747, an Airbus A380 and at least one other twin-jet, all representing one aircraft) not even indicating that the larger plane was damaged at all.

Charlie Tango is 98 minutes of unlikeable people doing unlikeable things. Not even the victims of the fatal air collision are given much sympathy, which makes its “twist ending” that much less meaningful. There are some fun moments in it, but it’s almost impossible to take it seriously as a thriller, much less an erotic one. Ultimately, there is something comforting about seeing middle-aged people make poor decisions, as if they were the teens they warned us about. It’s as if Stacie Mistysyn is playing a fifty-something version of a Degrassi teen, just one who really needs a therapist, and a lawyer.