Starring John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, Teyonah Parris & Kiefer Sutherland

Directed by Juel Taylor

Netflix

When a drug deal goes seriously wrong, Fontaine starts experiencing déjà vu, and forms an unlikely trio with Slick Charles and Yo-Yo to solve a mystery that leads them down a rabbit hole to the ultimate conspiracy.  

They Cloned Tyrone is available on Netflix. I’m not sure how it arrived here with no fanfare – especially given the cast and tone. They Cloned Tyrone is a black comedy that calls right back to the Blaxploitation genre of the 1970s, grainy filter simulating cheap celluloid and cameras included.

Staring John Boyega, Teyonah Parris and Jamie Foxx as a drug dealer, prostitute and pimp respectively, it sounds like the start to a joke and the film takes this idea all the way, making them excellently funny.

The premise is that Boyega’s character, Fontaine, is murdered one night but wakes up the next day perfectly fine and with no memory of what happened to him. When Yo-Yo and Slick Charles (Parris and Foxx respectively) call this out there follows an increasingly bizarre and conspiracy-laden storyline about exploitation, erasure and social engineering.

As with all good conspiracy stories there’s enough truth and call backs to real life events that the entire thing chills as much as the absurdity provokes laughter. The person I watched this with ended the film by listing all the real life events this was referencing in its exploitation of the Black community.

From the criminalisation of entire communities, to their deliberate ghettoization and regarding them as people to be erased for the common good and how being White is the default towards which they should aim, it’s all there.

One really brilliant piece of design was the technology. It wasn’t entirely clear from the setting when this was set and my read is this is entirely deliberate. It could have been in the 1970s except for small hints of modern tech such as occasional phones and a discussion about Bitcoin. This highlighted that access to modern technology relies on a basic inclusion in modern society. For poorer communities and those excluded, accessing modern tech is a huge challenge and can leave them living as if they’re in the past.

This is smart film making – focusing on conspiracies and urban myths not as White people see them but from a Black perspective.

To add to that, Boyega is almost unrecognisable in his role and both Foxx and Parris give great performances too.

Verdict: It’s not without its flaws but this is Blaxploitation modernised with an added injection of humour and it was fun, exciting and completely daft.

8 clones out of 10

Stewart Hotston

In the UK, during the Second World War, road signs were taken down to confuse unwanted intruders. If you didn’t know where you were going, that meant you weren’t supposed to be there. As I settled down to watch Netflix’s latest comedy conspiracy thriller, They Cloned Tyrone, I quickly realised I’d need a little help finding my way around. If, like me, you struggled a bit with the dialogue in The Wire, then save yourself some angst and put the subtitles on from the word go.

This isn’t a trivial observation.

Consciously or otherwise, the opaqueness of the delivery of the dialogue works as a cue by writer-director Juel Taylor, signalling that he is primarily addressing an audience he assumes to be already initiated into the territory he’s going to explore. Anyone else is an outsider. But while this may be a thematic idea, it’s a shame because the dialogue when you read it is terrific; bristling with electric, startling wordplay – with as many verbal ornaments and curlicues as a restoration comedy.

Set in a fictional, deprived Southern neighbourhood called The Glen, John Boyega casts a brooding, troubled presence as the drug dealer Fontaine, brilliantly countered by prostitute Yo-Yo, exuberantly played by Tayonah Parris, with Jamie Foxx on top form as pimp Slick Charles. If you’re thinking all this sounds a bit uncomfortably stereotypical – that’s the point. Beneath the wise-cracks and joyous one-liners, this is all about cultural stereotyping, and the conclusions Juel Taylor comes to won’t be the ones you’re expecting.

The plot takes all sorts of weird, wonderful twists and turns – involving a lot of cloning as the title suggests – but to go into too much detail would absolutely spoil the many pleasures of this fantastical movie, dangerously sharp as a chipped razor. Suffice to say, think Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but multiply that by a hundred. I loved Get Out. It felt fresh, and daring and ‘out there’ but They Cloned Tyrone rips up Peele’s rule book and takes us somewhere altogether darker and far more politically challenging – albeit through the medium of madcap caper comedy. Having finally tuned my ear into The Glen’s machine gun argot, by the end, I once again felt very much like an intruder who had walked into the most painful of family arguments.

Indeed, it’s hard not to wonder whether it’s precisely the provocative nature of Taylor’s thesis that explains why a movie with such obvious star-power hasn’t had a theatrical release, slipping instead onto a streaming platform with barely a whisper.

Verdict They Cloned Tyrone may be a bit too loopy for its own good at times, but I think it’s one of the most original and abrasively honest films I’ve seen in a very long while. I can’t wait to see what Juel Taylor does next. 

8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com