A secret ingredient in fried chicken that makes its eaters laugh. A secret ingredient in bottled juice that makes its drinkers dance. A secret ingredient in hair cream that makes its recipients relax. Is there something in the water too? Maybe.
They Cloned Tyrone, on Netflix, marks the directorial debut of a voice worth looking out for, Juel Taylor. With an irresistible blend of science fiction and comedy and drawing from the mood of classic conspiracy thrillers and Blaxploitation cinema, Taylor imbues his film with a striking neon-drenched, foggy aesthetic reminiscent of 80s sci-fi. It has the sort of quirkiness that characterised Alex Cox’s 1984 film Repo Man—the best example I can think of off the top of my head.
Given its vintage influences, They Cloned Tyrone had me initially under the assumption its setting is the 70s or 80s. The cars, outfits, and hairstyles do that. While John Boyega looks like he is someone from 2023, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris give one the impression that they just finished shooting for Superfly and Foxy Brown. This trio—a drug dealer Fontaine (Boyega), a pimp Slick Charles (Foxx), and Yo-Yo (Parris)—forms the central fulcrum of the movie when faced with a dilemma that upends their current reality. The film is cut out of the same cloth as the work of Jordan Peele and Donald Glover in that they address certain fears by packaging them with humour. But Taylor doesn’t go to the extremely chilling depths that Peele and Glover ventured into. What their work does have in common, though, is a unique sense of humour, both dark and otherwise.
Tyrone also draws from the best of the ‘doppelganger’ thrillers, where one character has to come to terms with the existence of his double/clone in a way that we have not seen done before. Of course, you would find a carload of movies about clones and doppelgangers—because they spawn some cool sci-fi stories—but Tyrone succeeds at mining some fresh plot developments out of them. Without giving anything away, the central premise involves the death of a certain character and subsequent consequences. But it’s not the threat arising from pursuing a certain career choice that causes the events in the film, as we would soon find out.
Eventually, it’s about a sense of community—how members of one community, notwithstanding their initial disagreements, have to come together to counter threats they realise are much bigger than their petty quarrels.
Boyega, by now something of a veteran in the contemporary sci-fi scene, sells Fontaine’s paranoia and disorientation quite well without resorting to any heightened theatricality. But it is Foxx who gives us one of the funniest performances of his career here. Slick is the sort of character that we can tell he had a total blast with—it gives him enough opportunities to flex his comedic chops—and, suddenly, you begin to wish you saw him doing this more often. We also see an admirable level of finesse in Parris’ performance; she is a complete riot as Yo-Yo, who makes one imagine contemporary updates of every badass Pam Grier movie. There is a ‘detective’ scene she pulls off with a chicken leg that had me cracking up.
Film: They Cloned Tyrone Director: Juel Taylor Cast: John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, Teyonah Parris, Kiefer Sutherland Streamer: Netflix Rating: 3.5/5
