THEY CLONED TYRONE - Mark Reviews Movies

They Cloned Tyrone, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 20, 2023

The setup and central notion of They Cloned Tyrone are so funny, smart, and incisive that it almost doesn't matter co-writer/director Juel Taylor, making his feature filmmaking debut, takes a few wrong turns in the third act. Everything leading up to it is almost too complex in its plotting and its satirical aims to be resolved in a fully satisfactory way, anyway, so it's probably best to simply enjoy the fun and thoughtful trip to the disappointing conclusion.

Taylor and co-screenwriter Tony Rettenmaier's story takes place in a fictional metropolitan neighborhood called The Glen, a predominantly Black area of an unnamed city where the license plates announce the location as "A Swell Place." That's certainly not the case for our trio of protagonist, though.

One is Fontaine (John Boyega), a drug dealer struggling with local competition, a mother who seems to spend most of her days and nights in her bedroom keeping up with her stories on TV, and the grief of the death of a younger brother. When we first meet Fontaine, he's dealing with a rival drug operation that's selling in his territory, and after running down one of the gang's dealers with his car, Fontaine puts a big target on himself.

That pays off pretty quickly in the story, after Fontaine is ambushed, shot six times, and left for dead by the head of the competition and the man he pummeled with his car. In the morning, though, Fontaine wakes up in his bed, goes through his regular routine, and seems unaware that he should almost certainly be dead. Was all of that a dream, or as one has probably already guessed from the title, is something else going on here?

Our other main characters are Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), a local pimp who dresses as if he's straight out of a 1970s Blaxploitation flick and still boasts his own ego for having won at a Players Ball in the '90s, and Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), one of the sex workers in Charles' employ with dreams of escaping the Glen and this life for more legitimate opportunities in Memphis. Both Charles and Yo-Yo heard the shots and assumed Fontaine was killed, so the seemingly resurrected dealer enlists their help to track down the men who shot him, in order to figure out how any of this is possible.

Their search leads to a metaphorical rabbit hole and a literal descent, by way of a secret elevator, into a vast conspiracy that only begins with the discovery that, yes, Fontaine had been shot and killed. Apparently, this version of the man is a clone created by the hidden powers running this mysterious, clandestine operation underground.

With all of that in place, the film becomes both a pretty compelling mystery, driven by the distinct personalities doing the investigating, and a pointed satire about how various elements of everyday life can be manipulated and exploited as a means of control. In this case, we're talking about fried chicken, sold at a fictional chain fast food restaurant that's one of the few places to get a meal in this neighborhood, being laced with a powerful powder, capable of bringing customers to fits of laughter, as well as dance music being arranged in such a way that it's capable of creating a kind of mass hypnosis.

In other words, it's all about pieces of culture and elements of society being engineered by outsiders, selling itself under the guise of some kind of authenticity, and keeping people in The Glen from fully comprehending the problems in the neighborhood and realizing the source of both the issues and the manipulation being enacted against them. Taylor and Rettenmaier's dissection of all of this is boldly provocative, especially during a scene in which a church service is presented as a distracting song-and-dance opiate for the congregation, with the preacher literally telling people not to worry about poverty and senseless death, among other ills (Said preacher's vague resemblance to a certain German philosopher sort of demands that loaded description of the idea).

The satire is broad but, clearly, pointed in its observations, as well as its relationship to the real world. Helping that comedic streak along, as the conspiracy deepens and the screenplay digs into some explanation for it (perhaps a bit too far, if some late-stage talk about alleged genetic proclivities takes the material in a direction that raises the specter of false theories about race), are the characters and performances. Boyega's a sturdy presence as a man who discovers some parts of his existence—if not the whole of it—are a lie, and Foxx is hilarious as the anachronistic, smartly smooth-talking Charles.

The standout, though, is Parris, whose Yo-Yo gets to channel her childhood love for the adventures of Nancy Drew to become an amateur sleuth herself—looking for the "missionary-position" explanation for what's happening, only to find a reality that's more akin to a "sex dungeon." Adding some threat to the latter parts of the story is Kiefer Sutherland, as a middle management figure, with a thick Southern drawl, within the nefarious organization.

A film with this many ideas and so much social/cultural relevance almost seems to demand a payoff that matches the intricacies of its setup, or does it? To be sure, the climax of They Cloned Tyrone, which shifts gears toward expository monologues (that don't make much of anything entirely clear) and action, is a major letdown. Even so, it would be unfair to allow that disappointment to overshadow the rest of the film, which is such a cleverly subversive and considered treat.

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