Movie Review : They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
Hollywood loves a good slavery movie. Suits love to beat themselves up about how bad America used to be and how much better they're making it by allowing black filmmakers to make slavery movie, but truth is that racism wasn't magically cured once black people became emancipated. It just has a more duplicitous face today and sometimes even presents itself as non-racism. It's that contemporary, duplicitous almost invisible racism that Juel Taylor's comedy They Cloned Tyrone is interested in.
They Cloned Tyrone tells the story of Fontaine (John Boyega), a drug dealer who gets shot by a rival who he just warned to stay off his territory. But Fontaine wakes up the next day and starts going over his daily routine until his business acquaintance Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) tells him that he's been mortally wounded the previous day. After witnessing another wounded man getting kidnapped and forced into a black van, Fontaine, Charles and a sex worker named Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) decide to investigate.
Systemic Racism and The Game
Well, They Cloned Tyrone is a rather simple film about complicated ideas. I mean, it's not quite square or straightforward. It blends a lot of genres and pleasantly subverts conventional film tropes, but it's discussing serious and complicated problems related to systemic racism. Fontaine is getting cloned by white people because of his role. In order to maintain a social hierarchy they're dominating, they need their black communities to have a drug dealer in place. They need a Fontaine to assure a balance to their construct.
That doesn't mean Fontaine is soulless or evil. He is merely flawed and trying to survive in a hostile environment. But his role is pivotal in preventing black communities in America from developing and wanting a bigger part of the social pie. When Fontaine understands that he's a clone and decides to (momentarily) abandon the investigation the white people corporation's conspiracy, he reverts to the lifestyle he knows. To being a cog in the machine. Breaking toxic patterns is hard when you don't know what else to do.
It's not just Fontaine. Every living soul in the ghetto of the Glen Juel Taylor created is prisoner of a stereotype of some sort. They all have clear role in a greater ecosystem: Yo-Yo is a ho even if she's undoubtedly the most brilliant character of the lot, Charles is an ineffectual pimp who hasn't changed with the times, Frog is forever condemned to being the weird, cryptic beggar. Systemic racism is really hard to fight because it claims to have given the people who fight it a place in its system even if the system sucks for them.
There's a great scene in They Cloned Tyrone where Slick Charles explains how he tricked the all-seeing corporation into breaking in its laboratory where he says something along the lines of "there's no sucker like the guy who sees what he's expecting to see" to a montage of the Glen residents devising their plan on camera while mimicking scenes of prostitution and drug intake. It's a super fucking cynical statement to make, but it doesn't make it any less true: you don't have to act the way people expect you to.
But What About Tyrone?
Don't get me wrong. Although it discusses difficult ideas, They Cloned Tyrone is a wild, creative and funny movie. Making a movie about conspiracy theories in 2023 is a tight rope to walk, but Juel Taylor went far enough into it and used cartoony enough ideas to make it work. I love how he made the mundane and the mid-century, Fallout-like vintage aesthetic coexist in the same universe. Sometimes in the same frame. Convenience stores and underground labs never felt this close.
I also love that you don't ever really meet Tyrone. You kind of do, but he's only theoretically important. That makes the movie even funnier somehow, like you're always expecting to somehow make this whole cloning plot add up with the titular character, but it never really does. They Cloned Tyrone is never laugh out loud funny, but it's filled with these clever wink-wink detail that make you feel like a co-conspirator every step of the way. For example, I don't know why all the suspicious white people have afros, but it's funny as shit.
*
They Cloned Tyrone definitely wasn't what I thought it was. It turned out to be one of the most adept allegories for systemic racism I've ever seen. It's also colourful, intense and completely out of whack. Not sure John Boyega was the best possible lead to carry it through. Early rumours wanted Brian Tyree Henry who's teddy bear vibe might've matched Fontaine better, but Boyega's alright at best. Even if it came out in the midst of The Bear, Oppenheimer and Barbie shenanigans, it's worth two hours of your time.
