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Remember how I said Netflix has been pitching more hits than misses lately? Well they’ve done it again. They Cloned Tyrone is presently #1 on Netflix with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 92% from critics and 100% from users. And it deserves those ratings.
They Cloned Tyrone is the directorial debut of Juel Taylor who you may recognize as the writer on Creed II and uh…Space Jam: A New Legacy. I think it’s safe to say with Space Jam that Taylor didn’t have much control of the shameless masturbation Warner Bros. turned the movie into. He just wrote the screenplay. Written by Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier, the latter of which also wrote Space Jam as well as Young. Wild. Free (Taylor did as wel), They Cloned Tyrone has big shoes to fill in a post-Get Out world. And thankfully it is well written and executed.

The film stars John Boyega as Fontaine, your average drug dealer in the neighborhood of Glen. Fontaine has all the fixings of a going-nowhere gangster; his dead brother, emotionally (and visually) absent mother, and his cohorts are all gangsters, drug dealers, and pimps. All this comes to head one day when Fontaine has a nightmare about being shot and killed in the parking lot of a crappy motel.
Well except the shooting wasn’t a dream, and Fontaine uncovers a vast government conspiracy involving his neighborhood and human cloning. Can Fontaine make the public see the truth? What are they putting in that delicious fried chicken? And why the hell is the film called They Cloned Tyrone? You’ll have to watch it to find out.

At least we know the secret herbs and spices to the film’s delicious fried chicken. Take one part casting. John Boyega is a talented actor in his own right, but the film groups him up with a pimp so slick his name is literally Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx). And of course the trio wouldn’t be complete without the constantly-at-retirement’s-door prostitute Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). There’s also a major appearance by Kiefer Sutherland as the devilish and charming bad guy, and David Alan Grier shows up to put on his good pastor role.
They Cloned Tyrone is a comedy movie, sure, but it does dig deeper and give its characters depth and heart. There’s also clear homages to blaxploitation flicks including the somewhat decent looking faux film grain they overlay on top. Everything from the dialogue to the color palettes for the sets and scenes feels meticulously chosen to create exactly the right mood and for a film that runs nearly two hours it does feel its length. Jamie Foxx is hilarious.

Director Taylor has referenced films like Groundhog Day and Napoleon Dynamit as influences, and it definitely shows. And not as a ripoff either but a film that builds its own thing. They were apparently going to have Brian Tyree Henry as Fontaine in this film but it didn’t work out. That’s probably for the best. I like Henry, but I don’t think his acting style would have matched the tone of the film and the expectation of him bouncing off Foxx and Parris.
They Cloned Tyrone is a dark movie, by which I mean it gets really dark in some scenes, by which I mean the lighting is so low you might have trouble seeing the movie depending on your television. Watch it at night with the curtains drawn in the dark with some popcorn and a bucket of fried chicken. Trust me, I’m a doctor.
Rating: A