Something to watch tonight: They Cloned Tyrone

The relent­less pas­sage of time means that even rel­at­ively recent stream­ing releases are supressed by the algorithm, bur­ied under the weight of the titles that they want you to watch now, dam­mit.

Even I had totally for­got­ten about They Cloned Tyrone until it showed up in a site search here recently. I ori­gin­ally reviewed it for the old Substack, back in July 2023:

John Boyega (the Star Wars sequels, Small Axe and The Woman King) plays Fontaine, a strug­gling drug deal­er in a semi-rural Southern loc­a­tion called The Glen. When he is stiffed on his share by a pimp named Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) he goes to the motel where Charles is lying low, retrieves his money and is then shot sev­er­al times by a rival in the park­ing lot.

Imagine everyone’s sur­prise, then, when he wakes up the next morn­ing in the same bed, and pro­ceeds to do the same things he did the day before. It’s not Groundhog Day – he him­self is unaware that he died the pre­vi­ous night until it is poin­ted out to him.

Fontaine, Slick Charles and one of Charles’ hook­ers Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) rather reluct­antly at first, attempt to get to the bot­tom of this mys­tery, which turns out to involve bizarre mind con­trol exper­i­ment­a­tion and a massive gov­ern­ment conspiracy.

It’s played at a fun and furi­ous pace – older view­ers might require sub­titles – and the dir­ec­tion, edit­ing, art dir­ec­tion and per­form­ances all com­bine to make it a thor­oughly enter­tain­ing, if ulti­mately enra­ging, two hours. To throw back to Slumdog Millionaire, I once said that after see­ing that at the Embassy Theatre, every film for the next few weeks felt old fash­ioned and that’s what I think about this one, too.

The final third isn’t as thrill­ing as the first two but that’s because the film reveals what it has on its mind. And it’s a lot.

Also in that July 2023 news­let­ter, the Aussie music doc­u­ment­ary John Farnham: Finding the Voice (now avail­able as a digit­al rent­al) and anoth­er for­got­ten Netflix doc­u­ment­ary, Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, about the Webb tele­scope pro­ject and its mind-boggling images of the galaxy. I sus­pect that will play slightly dif­fer­ent now, after the swinge­ing cuts made to Nasa under the cur­rent régime.

Where to watch They Cloned Tyrone

Worldwide: Streaming on Netflix