They Cloned Tyrone
Blaxploitation meets sci-fi with a generous dollop of broad satire (and farce) just doesn’t cut it.
Hair today: Teyonah Parris, Jamie Foxx and John Boyega
It’s probably a good idea knowing what to expect when you sit down to watch They Cloned Tyrone. Not that it’s an easy film to pigeonhole. It’s obviously a pastiche, a homage, and a very broad satire – and it starts promisingly. John Boyega plays Fontaine, a hardened drug dealer, his visage fixed in an undeviating scowl. But where he is dealing is unclear. The state number plates read ‘A Swell Place’ and the period is undefined (retro-futuristic?). Anyway, you don’t mess with Fontaine: he carries a piece and uses his 1970s’ Chevy as a battering ram. You pay up, Man, or suffer the consequences. There are two other people in Tyrone’s immediate universe: a jive-talkin’ pimp, Slick Charles, played by Jamie Foxx, and Yo-Yo, a daughter of the street, so to speak, limned by Teyonah Parris. The language is consistently profane, so the idea of a pimp, a ‘ho and a drug dealer walking into a bar nails the tone, at least linguistically.
Utilising a grainy, muddy palette, director and co-writer Juel Taylor conjures up a stereotypical depiction of the underbelly of American street life. Boyega is great, immersing himself into the unflinching image of a man without a future, which proves to be ironic. He is still mourning the loss of his little brother at the hands of a cop shooting, and cares for his mother, but otherwise he’s all granite. Foxx is more of a cliché and hard to comprehend (he’s never had great enunciation) while Teyonah Parris is pure pantomime. Then, when Tyrone is gunned down by a rival, and his day is replayed like new, the transition is jarring. Groundhog Day has been done to death (remember Happy Death Day? Palm Springs?). And so the same details of Tyrone’s day play out as before, although Jamie Foxx is in a different outfit. Ha!
What Juel Taylor appears to be doing is playing with genre, while forcing home a pretty broad and obvious message. However, his stereotypes are so unsubtle and the action so unwieldy that it’s hard to take anything seriously or to engage with it in any way. There’s the odd good line (if you can catch it), and the hair designer obviously had a field day, creating a wide variety of tonsorial topiary. But it’s really a bum-numbing shambles which we’ve seen too many times before. Which is a shame, as John Boyega really is terrific.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: John Boyega, Teyonah Parris, Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier, J. Alphonse Nicholson, Tamberla Perry, Eric Robinson Jr, Kiefer Sutherland, Trayce Malachi.
Dir Juel Taylor, Pro Charles D. King, Stephen ‘Dr’ Love, Tony Rettenmaier, Juel Taylor, Jamie Foxx and Datari Turner, Screenplay Tony Rettenmaier and Juel Taylor, Ph Ken Seng, Pro Des Franco-Giacomo Carbone, Ed Saira Haider, Music Desmond Murray and Pierre Charles, Costumes Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, Dialect coach Tangela Large.
MACRO Media-Netflix.
122 mins. USA. 2023. UK and US Rel: 21 July 2023. Cert. 15.
