In America today, no one has a lock on the conspiracy theory. It has become the air we breathe, the Kool-Aid we drink, the rabbit hole ideology that defines so many of us. However, conspiracy theories come in all different shapes and sizes. Many are false, some are true. Many are crazy about the bat house, some are more than plausible. They all, in one way or another, function as metaphors: for the forces (within government, corporations, whatever) that collaborate to hide things from us, for the sinister and tantalizing truth we are not allowed to see.
They Cloned Tyrone is a slow-burning inner-city sci-fi nightmarish thriller, one that plays into the spirit of conspiracy theory that has often thrived, justifiably, within black culture. The Tuskegee experiment was a conspiracy that happened; its terrible impact on the hearts and minds of African Americans is immeasurable. And in the 1970s, the belief that the CIA, linked by the Vietnam War to the Golden Triangle (the source of most of the world's heroin), was dumping drugs into America's slums was a notion that gained acceptance, culminating a decade later in the theory that the CIA was the hidden force behind the crack epidemic.
Director: Juel Taylor
Writers: Tony Rettenmaier, Juel Taylor
Stars: John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, Teyonah Parris
Those theories, and the palpable sense that just because it's extreme doesn't mean it isn't true that lies behind them, are the deep paranoid undercurrent of They Cloned Tyrone, a movie that takes things to the extreme but still wants to touch a nerve of reality.
It begins as the grounded drama of three vivid low-level criminals. There's John Boyega as Fontaine, a drug dealer who, according to one character, has never laughed, and we look at Boyega, sullenly impassive in his gold grillz (he gives a quietly implosive performance unlike anything he's done before), and we can believe that to be true. There's Jamie Foxx as Slick Charles, a pimp in a sculpted paisley bathrobe who's seen better days (“I was Pimp of the Year at the 1995 International Players Ball!”), and who rules his roost with an ice-cold bravado that, as played by the wily Foxx, is as entertaining as it is convincing in its small-time megalomania. And there's Teyonah Parris as Yo-Yo, a sex worker who makes her living with Charles, and who deals with him in as hostile and rococo bawdy ways as he deals with her.
The filmmaker, Jule Taylor, has never directed a feature film before (he co-wrote “Creed II”), but he stages scenes in a visually stunning mood of funky melancholy. The dialogue, which he wrote with Tony Rettenmaier, is quick and bouncy in his salty-dog rage. And the actors are so good that I wish the movie had simply followed the daily fate of these three characters.
For a while, he plunges us into the mundane life of a district called the Glen, as Fontaine goes through his morning ritual of buying a 40 bill and scratch card and pouring a shot of malt liquor into the cup of an elderly homeless man, Frog (Leon Lamar), who offers him a daily aphorism ("It's in the water, young blood," he says, talk about conspiracy!). David Alan Grier appears as a crying gospel preacher, and he's so riveting that for about five minutes he hijacks the movie.
But the very title of "They Cloned Tyrone," an allusion to Erykah Badu's 1997 live concert track "Tyrone," lets you know this isn't just going to be a part of neighborhood life. There are deadly fights over cash, and a key character ends up dead, shot multiple times in the torso.
The dark facts are out in the open. But who does what to whom? Let's just say there's a conspiracy at hand that makes "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 takes them to a laboratory below. There, they find a white powder that looks like cocaine (but isn't), as well as a white geek in a lab coat and hair that looks like he stole it from Roberta Flack. This produces a gigantic "What do you say?" collective, a feeling that is only intensified when our trio visits the local fried chicken joint and discovers that the chicken is not only tasty, but it makes everyone in the place crash with laughter. The white powder is in the chicken!
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