‘They Cloned Tyrone’ Review: Jamie Foxx and John Boyega in a Sociological Sci-Fi Nightmare

In America today, no one has a lock on conspiracy theory. It has become the air we breathe, the Kool-Aid we drink, the rabbit-hole ideology that defines too many of us. Yet conspiracy theories come in different shapes and sizes. Many are false, some are true. Many are bat-house crazy, some are more than plausible. All, in one way or another, work as metaphors: for the forces (within government, corporations, whatever) that collude in hiding things from us, for the sinister tantalizing truth that we arent allowed to see.

They Cloned Tyrone is a slow-burn inner-city sci-fi nightmare thriller, one that plays off the spirit of conspiracy theory that has often thrived with justification within Black culture. The Tuskegee experiment was a conspiracy that happened; its horrific impact on the hearts and minds of African-Americans is beyond measure. And in the 1970s, the belief that the CIA, linked by the war in Vietnam to the Golden Triangle (the source of most of the worlds heroin), was dumping drugs into Americas inner cities was a notion that gained currency, culminating a decade later in the theory that the CIA was the hidden force behind the crack epidemic.

Those theories, and the palpable sense of just-because-its-extreme-doesnt-mean-its-not-true that underlies them, are the paranoid deep background of They Cloned Tyrone, a movie that pushes things to an extreme but still wants to touch a nerve of reality.

It begins as the grounded drama of three vivid bottom-rung criminals. Theres John Boyega as Fontaine, a drug dealer who one character says has never laughed, and we look at Boyega, sullenly impassive in his gold grillz (he gives a quietly implosive performance unlike anything hes done before), and can believe thats true. Theres Jamie Foxx as Slick Charles, a pimp in a sculpted fro and paisley bathrobe who has seen better days (I was a 1995 International Players Ball pimp of the year!), and who rules his roost with a cold-as-ice bravura that, as the wily Foxx plays it, is as entertaining as it is convincing in its small-time megalomania. And theres Teyonah Parris as Yo-Yo, a sex worker who earns her keep under Charles, and who stands up to him in as hostile and rococo obscene a fashion as he does to her.

The filmmaker, Jule Taylor, has never directed a feature before (he was a co-writer on Creed II), but he stages scenes with a visually impressive mood of funky gloom. The dialogue, which he wrote with Tony Rettenmaier, is fast and vivacious in its salty-dog rage. And the actors are so good that I would have been happy if the movie had simply followed the day-to-day fates of these three characters.

For a while, it immerses us in the dailiness of life in a district called The Glen, as Fontaine goes through his morning ritual of buying a 40 and a scratch-off card and pouring a shot of the beer into the cup of a homeless old man, Frog (Leon Lamar), who offers him a daily aphorism (Its in the water, young blood, he says talk about conspiracy!). David Alan Grier shows up as a gospel preacher in full cry, and hes so mesmerizing that for about five minutes he hijacks the movie.

But the very title of They Cloned Tyrone, an allusion to Erykah Badus 1997 live-concert track Tyrone, lets you know that this is not just going to be some slice of hood life. There are lethal scuffles over cash, and a key character winds up dead, shot several times through the torso.

One scene later, hes alive and well.

Dark doings are in the offing. But whos doing what to whom? Lets just say that theres a conspiracy at hand that makes the one in Get Out look like an amateur parlor trick. At one point, the three characters enter a deserted trap house, only to discover a gleaming elevator that whisks them to a laboratory below. There, they find a white powder that resembles cocaine (but isnt), as well as a white geek in a lab coat and hair that looks like he stole it off Roberta Flack. This produces a giant collective Say what?, a feeling thats only enhanced when our trio visit the local fried-chicken joint and discover that the chicken isnt just tasty, its making everyone in the place collapse into giggles. The white powder is in the chicken!

So if fried chicken is part of the conspiracy, what else about their lives is? Answer: everything. The drugs. The violence. The gospel church. The hip-hop strip club. They Cloned Tyrone is Get Out meets The Truman Show, with a bit of the John Wick series the-top-level-rules-it-all world-building. By the time Fontaine busts down the bedroom door that his mama is always talking to him from the other side of, only to discover that mama is a speaker box, were not in Kansas or The Glen anymore.

On paper it all sounds sinister and intriguing. Yet just as our eyes should be widening at the cosmic paranoia of it all, were thinking, Wait, how does this conspiracy actually work? What it involves is clones, a shell game of illusion, a vast underground network of sinister but innocuous white men in control of everythingand more clones. It should all feel threatening, but instead it feels half-baked in its grandiosity. Simply put, They Cloned Tyrone has a good set-up, but the film is too sketchy and conceptual to work as a bad-dream thriller. Yet it establishes Jule Taylor as a director of craft and a certain audacious nerve. Next time I hope he trades conspiracy for reality.