Year: 2023
Director: Juel Taylor
They Cloned Tyrone is a high concept sort-of-comedy which owes a little to Jordan Peele’s first two films (Get Out and Us), a little more to Boots Riley’s cult hit Sorry To Bother You and a little more again to Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s Cabin In The Woods, which is to say it’s an existential satire which is both extremely stylish and enormous fun. While acknowledging the debt the script owes in terms of ideas, it is in the execution that this film excels.
The dialogue is often the star – it snaps, crackles and pops (is VERY sweary, with all the bad words) and is delivered with some flair by a terrific Jamie Foxx and especially Teyonah Parris (Monica Rambeau in the Marvelverse) whose larger than life performances bounce perfectly off their more serious star.
That star being John Boyega, with his Attack The Block gameface very much back on. He plays drug dealer Fontaine, who is gunned down by someone just a bit badder but then finds himself still alive and undamaged. In trying to get to the bottom of this perplexing outcome, he is accompanied by a Foxx’s pimp Slick and Parris’ prostitute Yo-yo.
(Yes, there is an initial ickiness about cliches in the script, but it becomes apparent that that is an ingredient in the satire – there’s even a scene where the trio make an important breakthrough while eating fried chicken).
Things are heating up nicely when Kiefer Sutherland turns up to deliver a Mr-Smith-from-The-Matrix style antagonist’s pitch:
“America was an experiment. A half-baked idea cooked up by aristocratic idealogues living in mansions built by slaves. And when they checked out, they left us with the bill – a country constantly at war with itself..”
Beyond that I’d be reluctant to give away any more. I wish you could come to this as I did, knowing pretty much nothing, but then how could I persuade you to give it a try?
This film has been out quite a while, so all of this may be old news to many of you, but if – like me – you have Netflix and are looking for something to take a punt on and you have an appetite for smart, witty films with weird ideas and groovy soundtracks (the music is pretty fine throughout and used to great effect) then I hope my four cups rating will encourage you to consider it..
Might appeal to people who enjoyed:
Those films mentioned back at the top, mainly.
One more thing: however much you might enjoy this movie, you will spend the whole time wondering who the titular Tyrone is. The payoff is TOTALLY worth it..
If you need a further push, there’s this. I’d recommend you don’t watch it:
Thanks Sewer! That sounds excellent.
I’ll put it on my list of things to see and hope that I ‘ve forgotten the details by the time I get to watch it.
I saw the tile and thought ‘why would anyone want to make a copy of a county full of culchies?’.
I’ve never heard the word “culchies” before (despite being half Irish and having many Irish friends and being a Wordiply player of some repute). One particular Irish friend uses the word “gurriers”. a lot. She reckons it’s Irish for “chavs”. (She’s from a posh part of Dublin.)
Its not as pejorative as ‘chavs’. Its more used to describe the sort of people that love tractors and listen to Irish country music.
I remember one of our teachers, who was from “down the country”, tried to persuade us that culchie was derived from “cultured”, so we just switched to calling our cousins mucksavages or woollybacks..