In real life conspiracy theories have never interested me. I could just never trust the sources. Nor could I ever feel like I could trust any evidence enough to buy it as truthful. I do believe the CIA tested LCD on some people in the 60s and I do believe the US government gave some black dudes syphilis—that’s enough to disturb me enough to not want to know anymore.
But in movies it’s different. Still, why am I more likely to engage in a fictional story about white people perpetrating some heinous conspiracy against black people? Well, there’s history for one reason.
They Cloned Tyrone (2023, Juel Taylor) is a black conspiracy comedy that feels like when Hollywood makes a genre film that reminds you how fun they're supposed to be. When people talk about a good story, that’s stupid—story could mean so many different things. But I really enjoyed the way the first and second acts of They Cloned Tyrone take on a Nancy Drew format. YO-YO’s even got that full collection of Nancy Drew books and SLICK CHARLES says something like damn how many adventures does this bitch go on? Okay a minor possible gripe though is maybe there’s a little too many pop culture references. The number of them is staggering. But they’re mostly all funny.
And so the best thing about how They Cloned Tyrone does the conspiracy genre is that it doesn’t have a message; instead, it utilizes its subject matter through its plot. The movie is about the white man doing mind control and experiments only on black people in the hood. And through its tone we get this midpoint where we feel how helpless and defeated FONTAINE is. That lottery ticket he scratches says it all: you lose. Also I don’t think this is giving anything away (the movie is about clones) but early on in that drive-by I couldn’t get over how cinematic the set piece became when they gun him down. The way the camera uses an open frame and we don’t see the other car or the gunman, how suspensefully and scary it is to see the glass shatter and the body stagger, struggling in its final throes of death.
The three main cast also do so much for why They Cloned Tyrone works. Because despite what they do for a living and the dirt they do, they’re friends. And they do right by one another. So we got a great Nancy Drew premise, protagonists we love, some sci-fi, but more than all—comedy. When I see new releases in the theater, I’m always asking myself why don’t I ever get to see more comedies?
I found myself letting myself laugh at some stupid shit. Like when ISSAC pulls that gun on Slick Charles in the hair salon, and he shows the piece but gets tripped up because Slick Charles doesn’t react—then he realizes it’s because he’s still got his smock on from getting a haircut. And as messed up as the mystery gets, it only proves to be that much more conducive to all of the race humor. How many ways does Slick Charles have for describing white skin? And way funny when the trio discover the conspiracy and Slick Charles mentions other cover-ups by the white man like the Berenstein Bears.
They Cloned Tyrone handles its story elements simple but well. And something that I left the theater with was the disturbing memory of those black dudes down in the lab that were subjects of some experiment that turned them white (but they still had a fro). That’s what sci-fi means to me. Relevant. But not overt. And again of course imaginative.
7/14/2023 Midtown Art Cinema
Atlanta, GA
DCP
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