Juel Taylor’s They Cloned Tyrone is a satirical science-fiction story styled as a Blaxploitation film. Set in the gritty world of The Glen, this odd-throuple comedy stars John Boyega as Fontaine, a small-time drug dealer whose days play out in the same dreary cycle of events: He stumbles out of bed, does a little business, hits the local liquor store, and does whatever he has to do to keep his rivals in check and make sure his customers pay on time.
There’s a grainy quality to the way that Taylor’s feature-length directorial debut has been shot that allows it to stand apart from just about every other Netflix original film. It’s also in the way that the sickly yellow and green lights of the environments that barely brighten the seedy motel rooms and dilapidated homes always seem as if they’re being glimpsed through a fog. In fact, They Cloned Tyrone looks so much like a ’70s B movie that we’re taken aback to hear a character insisting that crypto-currency is going to be their way out of this lifeless place.
If you’re discombobulated, then the film is already doing its job, and well. You see, The Glen is a place where nothing changes, filled with people who never make it out of the neighborhood and the way of life they were born into. But it turns out that the reasons for that might be a whole lot stranger than the banally evil socio-economic forces that usually entrap people.
Fontaine first realizes that there’s something strange going on in The Glen after taking a hail of bullets to the chest during a fire fight, only to wake up back in bed the next morning like nothing ever happened. His search for answers quickly leads him to team up with a local pimp named Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx). Decked out in extravagant combinations of fur, leather and glittering gold, Slick Charles is a former Player’s Ball Pimp of the Year whose glory years are behind him. These days, he conducts his business from a cramped motel room alongside a handful of women who will put up with his self-aggrandizing style.
One of those women is Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), a Nancy Drew enthusiast who becomes the third member of Fontaine’s investigative team. “You need to inhale,” Slick warns her, but the truth is that they’re both as inexhaustibly talkative as each other. Their clothes might be plucked from the Blaxploitation era, but their dynamic is reminiscent of a classic screwball couple. They banter and bicker their way through the entirety of They Cloned Tyrone, cursing each other out one moment and bonding over Kevin Bacon movies the next without missing a beat.
Slick and Yo-Yo’s back-and-forths are so rapid that lines get buried in the oratory onslaught, like Slick at one point referring to the aforementioned fire fight as Fontaine “pulling a Fifty Cent.” But that can actually work to the advantage of a comedy like this, because every time you return to it, you’re bound to come away with a new favorite joke. Slick and Yo-yo’s volatile comic energy drives They Cloned Tyrone, with the highlight of Foxx and Parris’s camaraderie a seemingly improvised scene in which their character pass the time inside an elevator by singing a high-pitched duet of Mary J. Blige’s “I’m Going Down,” using their pistols as microphones.
Amid this comic brio, Boyega’s Fontaine represents a balancing agent. While Foxx and Parris are giddily committing to bits and ripping off esoteric insults, Boyega offers a more somber, stolid presence that prevents their freewheeling energy from derailing the film. And as the plot becomes increasingly more bizarre and the bullets begin to fly, his wounded performance ensures that the emotional core of the movie remains more or less intact.
Which is a good thing, because Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier’s script does get pretty bizarre, what with our central trio’s investigation ultimately uncovering a conspiracy involving secret laboratories, mind-controlling hair products, and a host of other sinister secrets about the neighborhood they call home. Most of these twists are pretty well telegraphed and the big final reveal is a little half-baked, but watching our would-be detectives bumble their way through the case is so much fun that it’s hard to care too much about what they actually find out.
They Cloned Tyrone is part of a wave of satirical sci-fi from Black artists that began with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, rippling out into other socially conscious genre riffs like Atlanta and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. The satire here isn’t quite as on point as that of its predecessors—the resolution to the film’s central mystery isn’t as metaphorically perfect as that of Get Out or as gut-punchingly absurd as that of Sorry to Bother You—but it helps that Boyega, Parris, and Foxx share the sort of chemistry that even the most secretive government lab couldn’t cook up.
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