‘They Cloned Tyrone’: Netflix’s Sci-Fi Blaxploitation Satire Cuts to the Bone

David Fear
·4 min read
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They Cloned Tyrone - Credit: Parrish Lewis/Netflix
They Cloned Tyrone - Credit: Parrish Lewis/Netflix

“A pimp, a ho, and a drug dealer walk into a bar,” says one character in They Cloned Tyrone, writer-director Juel Taylor’s conspiracy thriller/comedy/cautionary tale. It should be noted that the person making this statement is white, racist as hell, and works for a shady branch of the government that you won’t find on the books anywhere. He’s also played by a well-known actor, whose identity we won’t spoil. The villain is describing the film’s trio of heroes, Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), and Fontaine (John Boyega) — all of whom someone might have respectively (and very reductively) described as a peddler of flesh, a woman of the night, and a pharmaceutical entrepreneur. Because this is uttered at the movie’s halfway point, we know they contain multitudes. But in this bad guy’s eyes, and maybe to some blinkered viewers as well, they’re simply manufactured caricatures. Or maybe stereotypes.

And though it sounds like the beginning of a joke — Tyrone has more than its share of laughs — that moment is not meant to be funny “ha-ha.” More like funny “just because you’re paranoid….” A screenwriter (Creed II) and TV director making his solo feature debut, Taylor does introduce his holy trinity of badasses as recognizable types who live in a generic, unidentified Everyhood, U.S.A. We’ve seen them before. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Because after an extended beginning that plays out like a straight-faced turf-war drama, Fontaine catches what appears to be a fatal bullet.

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Then the young man wakes up the next morning, and everything’s the same as it was yesterday. That’s the first sign that something weird is up. The second thing is that, while Fontaine is at the local food mart buying a 40 oz. and a scratch-off ticket, he sees a dazed, bloodied figure wandering in the street. A black SUV screeches toward them, its occupants throw the person into the car, and it drives away. What’s going on here?

The hint is in the title, but even that tip of the hat doesn’t give you the full story. Not really. Fontaine and his partners in crimesolving — Yo-Yo is a big Nancy Drew fan — don’t find themselves in a bar but an underground laboratory, where a white guy with an Afro is conducting some sort of test. That leads them to similar subterranean lairs located under a church and liquor store, where a lot of nefarious shit is indeed going down. You can pick up some clues as well in the commercials on TV and billboards plastered all around the block, all of which are aimed at a very specific demographic. Not to mention those mysterious missing-person posters.

You can sit back and watch They Cloned Tyrone as just another comic sci-fi/action romp, just another piece of Netflix “content” to stream on a Saturday night. Foxx plays the aptly named Slick Charles as a cross between a roguish reluctant hero and a recurring In Living Color character, Boyega brings a serious next-gen leading-man vibe to the proceedings, and Parris is great as a woman who becomes a chameleon-like detective because, well, Parris as an actor is a first-rate chameleon. The score by Pierre Charles and Desmond Murray is the perfect cross between early Seventies Roy Ayers and early Eighties John Carpenter. Costume designer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck deserves a gold medal for Foxx’s outfits alone. It could be tighter, tenser, a little sharper with its satire. Yet there are enough big, better-than-decent movie moments, from shoot-outs to impromptu elevator sing-alongs, that not even a small screen can dilute. That’s entertainment!

But this is also a movie that, like a lot of conspiracy thrillers, prods you to look a little deeper at a few things. And while Taylor and his co-writer Tony Rettenmaier are playing into the fears of a community that have extremely legitimate reasons not to trust the power structures that be, they’re also hoping you’ll consider a few things even as they’re going for broad laughs, loud booms, and retro camp. Such as: Can consumerism be a form of social mind control? What’s the incentive behind cloning certain people over others? Is it more important to think about who ends up declaring that “Assimilation is better than annihilation,” or why that person is saying it in the first place? They Cloned Tyrone is a comedy, but it’s also righteously angry as hell. It forces you to recognize not just that the impetus behind that “joke” the bad guy says was never really funny, but also remind you that it came from a tragedy.

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