Stream It Or Skip It: ‘They Cloned Tyrone’ on Netflix, a Rousing, Funny Genre-Mashup From Freshman Director Juel Taylor

If Soylent Green was a blacksploitation film it might’ve been They Cloned Tyrone (now on Netflix). For his debut feature, director Juel Taylor mashes up the stuff of conspiracy thrillers, surreal comedy and political satire, and gives principals John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris a script that might end up being the year’s funniest. So yeah, review spoiler alert: This one is a hell of a lot of fun.  

THEY CLONED TYRONE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: One of the local neighborhood kids has Fontaine (Boyega) pegged: He’s a real Squidward. He goes about his every day with brow furrowed, eyelids heavy, mouth scowled. He’s likely been this way since his little brother died after being gunned down needlessly by a trigger-happy cop. Now he sells drugs and comes home to the dimly lit, rundown house where he lives with his mother, who we never see because she’s always in her bedroom “watching her stories.” He runs down a rival dealer with his car, breaking his leg, then heads to a local fleabag motel to shake some money out of Slick Charles (Foxx), a pimp who spends a lot of time nurturing his pompadour afro and cocaine pinky nail. Getting paid isn’t free, though – Fontaine has to listen to Slick Charles and his primary earner Yo-Yo (Parris) bicker and squabble endlessly, and if they were comic-book characters – which they kind of are! – their speech balloons would layer atop one another until the words mooshed together into a big wad of incomprehensible gobbledygook.

On his way out, Fontaine is ambushed by his rival. BANG BANG BANG BANG. Four bullets in his torso. Wheezing, he slumps behind the steering wheel of his car and then wakes up no worse for wear the next day. Um… what… wait… was it just a dream? Fontaine’s a little groggy and confused but goes about his usual routine, stopping at the convenience store for a 40, some smokes and a losing scratch-off lottery ticket, and to say hi to the old drunk guy who sits on the bench and slurs nutty stuff like, “It’s in the water, youngblood.” Then Fontaine stops to see Slick Charles, who isn’t as slackjawed as you might be if you saw a guy who was just last night very much dead but is now standing in front of you very much alive, and the presumptive reason for that is, Slick Charles has coke for breakfast, second breakfast, third breakfast and brunch every day. 

Somehow, Fontaine convinces Slick Charles and Yo-Yo to help him investigate this weirdness. They follow a lead to a deserted traphouse and take an elevator to an underground laboratory, where Fontaine pulls a sheet off a slab so he can get a big fat eyeful of his own dead body. TRIPPY. Slick Charles finds some enticing white powder in the lab, but he’s bummed to learn it ain’t cocaine. They emerge bewildered and sit down at the local fried chicken joint, where some contemplation of all this surreal madness finally, at long last, makes Fontaine laugh. Dude never laughs. Never! And then Slick Charles cracks this thing open a little more: That powder. It’s in the chicken. It’s in the grape drink. It’s in the hair straightener. WHAT THE PUS IS GOING ON. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: They Cloned Tyrone is a clear successor to Sorry to Bother You and Get Out, with Taylor drawing influence from Carpenter (They Live especially), Kubrick (catch those A Clockwork Orange references) and the Coens (everything from out-of-control capers like Burn After Reading to the conspiratorial The Man Who Wasn’t There), with nods to Hollow Man and Groundhog Day. 

Performance Worth Watching: Boyega is a strong foundation for the film, and Foxx has rarely been funnier, but Parris hijacks every scene she’s in with her portrayal of a loquaciously witty, slightly unhinged sex worker.  

Memorable Dialogue: Did we mention Yo-Yo loves reading children’s mystery novels? “Shit like this always happens to my girl Nancy Drew! Sis be comin’ across some weird kinky shit that don’t make no sense, but in the end, it turns out to be some regular-degular missionary-position vanilla shit!”

Sex and Skin: A booty-happy strip-club scene, some comedic miming of various sexual acts.

Our Take: They Cloned Tyrone is far from being “regular-degular missionary-position vanilla shit.” (Regular-degular!) It’s spiky and provocative, visually inspired and has a lot on its mind – specifically, the systematic oppression of Black people in America, a well-trod subject given a rousing, satirical treatment here. The film is alive with style and ideas, an audacious and ambitious emergence for Taylor, who co-wrote the crackling script with Tony Rettenmaier, and gives the film a gritty, grainy look, as if it’s going direct to a grindhouse screen in 1973. 

Granted, Taylor’s influences can be overly prevalent, and he struggles to maintain suspense as the film stretches to two hours and reaches a conclusion that’s somewhat flat compared to more raucous and waggish earlier acts. But he lithely wiggles between numerous genres, makes the very most of the take-everything-serious/take-nothing-serious dynamic of Boyega and Foxx/Parris respectively, and keenly cultivates drama and comedy in nearly every scene. The story seems to be set somewhere ever so slightly outside of our own timeline – the license plates read “A SWELL PLACE,” with scads of requisite irony; everyone uses late-’00s Razr-style flip phones – but is very much about the current politics of race and, as Slick Charles eloquently puts it, “existential circumstances,” two great things that taste great coming out of Taylor’s kitchen. This is the new cinematic world Jordan Peele created, and there’s no arguing that it’s a better place.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Taylor proves to be a promising new talent with They Cloned Tyrone, an imperfect but nevertheless intoxicatingly peculiar farce/thriller/satire/Scooby-Doo-ass mystery that’s very much a must-see.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.