John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris turn They Cloned Tyrone into Netflix’s biggest surprise
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A pimp, a drug dealer, and a prostitute walk into a trap house and discover a clandestine government cloning facility. That’s the elevator pitch for They Cloned Tyrone, Netflix’s new sci-fi comedy-thriller starring John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris.
Directed by Juel Taylor, known for his work as a writer on Creed II and Space Jam: A New Legacy, They Cloned Tyrone is Blaxploitation-y genre mashup that lands squarely between the surreal doppelganger-laden menace of Jordan Peele’s Us and the incisive political satire of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. The result is one of the funniest, most thrilling, and most surprising movies to come out this year.
The film centers on Fontaine (Boyega), a steely-eyed drug pusher living in the Glen, a predominantly Black neighborhood that’s seen better days. Haunted by the loss of his little brother and seemingly estranged from his mother, Fontaine goes about his days trying to make ends meet, shaking down clients and squaring up against would-be rival dealers looking to edge into his turf. Then, he’s ambushed and murdered. What would be the end of another film is only the beginning: Fontaine awakes the next morning in a cold sweat, miraculously unharmed and with seemingly no memory of the altercation.
With the help of smooth-talking hustler Slick Charles (Foxx) and Yo-Yo (Parris), a sex worker with dreams of escaping the Glen in search of a higher calling, Fontaine sets out in search of answers. What he discovers is a sinister conspiracy that seems to have transformed his entire neighborhood into a test bed for cruel experiments.
Taylor has described They Clone Tyrone as a movie with the spirit of a bootleg Scooby-Doo adventure, where
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