They Cloned Tyrone gets 100% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes with over 70 good reviews

They Cloned Tyrone gets 100% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes with over 70 good reviews.

“They Cloned Tyrone” is a creative, witty surprise in the middle of this summer of relatively dreadful original movies on streaming services. Shot over two years ago, it’s being shuffled off to Netflix with little fanfare, indicating yet again that these companies often don’t understand what they have. Don’t let Tyrone get buried in the algorithm. Comparisons to “Get Out,” “Sorry to Bother You,” and the Blaxploitation films that co-writer/director Juel Taylor clearly adores will be inevitable, but this is a striking debut and not just from how it weaves references to everything from “Hollow Man” to “Foxy Brown” into one clever script. The film’s greatest asset is a timeless one: three charming performers giving their all. It doesn’t quite stick the landing, but that’s largely because what comes before it is so fun, unexpected, and sharp that it would be almost impossible to do so.

Set almost entirely in an economically depressed but vibrant Black neighborhood somewhere in America, They Cloned Tyrone tells the tale of how dope dealer Fontaine (John Boyega) accidentally discovers an alarming truth about the place he’s called home for his entire life. As a local from the Glen — the small chunk of town where Fontaine pushes his products while trying to edge out competitors like Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson) — there’s little about his stomping grounds that he isn’t intimately familiar with. But between Fontaine tragically losing his younger brother, financially supporting his shut-in mother, and having few other viable options at his disposal, it makes far more sense from his perspective to make a living selling drugs to cash-strapped pimps like Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) than trying to work a 9-to-5.

Fontaine knows exactly where Isaac’s corner boys are usually posted up, just like he knows that he can always rely on Biddy (Tamberla Perry) and the Glen’s other sex workers to cough up information about where people are for the right price. Fontaine also knows that people like himself and Isaac — men who conduct their business violently and with little consideration for the hardships other people are dealing with — are part of what makes the Glen a dangerous place for kids like Junebug (Trayce Malachi) to grow up in.