They Cloned Tyrone
“They Cloned Tyrone” is a witty surprise amid this summer of wretched original movies on streaming. Filmed two years ago, it’s now being dumped on Netflix with little promotion, once again suggesting that these companies often don’t know what they have. Don’t let Tyrone get buried in the algorithm.
Comparisons to “Get Out,” “Sorry to Bother You” and Blaxploitation films are inevitable co-writer/director Juel Taylor clearly loves them all but this is a striking debut if only because of how it mashes up “Hollow Man” with “Foxy Brown” into something new. Its best attribute is an ageless one three charismatic actors giving everything they’ve got. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but then what comes before it is so fun, unexpected and sharp that it almost couldn’t.
John Boyega stars as Fontaine, a young man who lives in The Glen, an average neighborhood filled with average people. At first Fontaine seems like a cliché of the “gritty Black drama protagonist” playbook he has a distant mother who can only be heard through her door; his dead brother haunts his choices between right and wrong and he’s going to be a scowling drug dealer who figures out what’s important while dodging bullets from interlopers trying to take his turf, right? Wrong.
After crafting something of a prologue that shows The Glen as a character itself shot with gritty beauty by cinematographer Ken Seng Taylor has Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), one of those mythic pimps from Blaxploitation movies who used to star at Players Balls, shoot Fontaine dead as he tries to collect money from him. But then Fontaine wakes up the next day and goes about his business like nothing happened. When he returns to Charles later in the day, Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), one of his sex workers who saw him get shot the night before, can’t believe her eyes. The quick-witted Yo-Yo realizes this could be one of those Nancy Drew mysteries she used to love and springs into action, leading them on an investigation that uncovers something unimaginable and well, impossible. Without giving too much away, “They Cloned Tyrone” is practically a Blaxploitation take on “Cabin in the Woods” in how it suggests there’s an entire operation behind the scenes designed to keep people in their place. When Fontaine, Charles and Yo-Yo discover how an entire community’s strings are pulled, they set about to cut them.
Taylor and co-writer Tony Rettenmaier’s script, once a famous entry on the Black List, is consistently inventive and funny; but it wouldn’t work if not for actors as talented as Boyega, Parris and Foxx delivering it. Each performer brings a different necessary rhythm to the movie: Boyega is stoic grief personified, Parris balances his low energy with her high octane fearlessness, Foxx mostly provides comic relief but never steals focus. And their very different registers blend with excellent comic chemistry as these three unlikely heroes discover that all the conspiracy theories you’ve ever heard were just scratching at the surface of what was really going on. Some of the movie’s best moments are simply due to how expertly Boyega, Foxx and Harris play off each other.
By the time Kiefer Sutherland has a scene as the villain where he lays out “what’s going on,” Tyrone has played its hand. The final 30 minutes are not bad, but they are rushed and even more conventional than the best parts of that first hour. There’s some stuff here about community and the roles we have to play in it that could’ve been fleshed out with fewer monologues.
“They Cloned Tyrone” may buckle under the weight of its ideas, but it never snaps mostly because of how good this ensemble is, but also because Juel Taylor clearly knows what he wants to see and has an eye for it. He may be making a movie with nods to old classics like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” but those cultural touchstones feel fresh in his hands. I don’t think Juel Taylor is going to make a career copying anybody else.
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