They Cloned Tyrone

 They Cloned Tyrone (2023) is a new Netflix movie that tap-dances on the edge of the volcano of race-war.  It's  intended as violent action-comedy, along the lines of Ghostbusters, The dialogue is razor-sharp and extremely funny -- everyone talks in a caricatured ghetto-argot that is fantastically elaborate and dense with contemporary allusions.  Of course, no one could speak with this fluidity and eloquence in real life, but the stylized dialogue is the best thing in the movie, a picture that is otherwise a confused and botched mess.  Indeed, the way the characters interact and speak is so fascinating that the viewer will likely overlook the film's feeble plot and narrative problems.  That said, the movie's grasp exceeds its reach in all measures and the picture is not nearly as good as it is proclaimed by many critics to be.  Furthermore, the picture isn't particularly original -- it's main plot points derive from Jordan Peele's much better Us, a movie with an almost identical premise:  beneath our workaday world, there is a subterranean kingdom that forms the secret basis for what happens around us.  (The theme goes back to Lang's 1926 Metropolis with worker barracks in caves underneath the gleaming city on the surface.)  Peele's Us also anticipates the cloning theme in They Cloned Tyrone -- viewers will recall the huge wall covered in cages each holding an identical rabbit.  Us didn't exactly make sense except as a fever-dream; They Cloned Tyrone doesn't make any sense at all.

Nonetheless, the movie has a good, practically appealing, premise.  Set in an ugly suburban ghetto, three paradigms of the place's dysfunction league together to unravel a mystery -- the trio consist of a penny-ante drug dealer named Fontaine, a whore (YoYo) and her cowardly, but fantastically eloquent pimp, Slick Charles -- Slick Charles' career is in decline and he sadly observes that he was awarded the International Pimp of the Year award way back in 1995 but now he can scarcely get his girls to obey him at all.  These characters, symbols of the marginal demimonde that hamstrings the ghetto, a place called "the Glen", are unlikely heroes and so the movie scores initially by putting them at the forefront of the plot.  The first half of the movie, a perverse variant on a Nancy Drew mystery or Scooby Doo, is much better than the film's second half where the plot deteriorates into nonsense.  YoYo, the whore, grew up in her grandma's house reading Nancy Drew mysteries and, when Fontaine, who was shot to death in a motel parking lot, mysteriously comes back to life, she is convinced that she can solve this enigma -- she says:  "everything will turn out to be regular-degular vanilla missionary-position bullshit."  (In other words, the apparent occult activity will turn out to be just a criminal scheme perpetrated by villains.)  Fontaine has been in fight with another drug dealer in which he drives his car into the man and breaks his leg.  That night, when Fontaine comes to collect a debt from Slick Charles, he gets gunned down in the parking lot, but mysteriously is back on the streets the next day.  With Yoyo and Slick Charles, Fontaine uncovers a plot to control the people living in the ghetto by poisoning them with laughing powder (put in their fried chicken at the local Got Damn Chicken franchise), putting happiness meds in their hair straightener products ("straighter is greater") and infusing their communion grape juice with mind-altering agents.  Entering a so-called "trap house" -- apparently, a house set up and under surveillance by the cops to entrap burglars -- they find a hidden elevator that transports them into a sinister laboratory a hundred feet underground.  As it turns out, the laboratory is part of a vast subterranean complex where White scientists -- and they are all White or Asian -- are influencing the ghetto by pouring psychogenic agents into it.  (The film suggests an allegory about the use of heroin or crack cocaine to control Black people in the slums.)  One of the nodes for contaminating the ghetto is a strip club.  When our heroes enter the strip club to investigate how that place enforces discipline on the ghetto and its denizens, the hypnotized bargoers swarm onto the street to pursue YoYo, Fontaine, and Slick Charles.  Just before they are torn to pieces, the White villain appears on the scene, although he proclaims that he is merely someone who reports to another boss who himself has a boss and so on.  This man, played by Kiefer Sutherland, drawling a sort of "cracker" Oklahoma accent, says that the powers-that-be are using various means to keep the ghetto under control.  He gives a speech in which he declares that the United States was founded "by idealogues living in mansions built by slaves" and that the country has always been deeply divided -- the project of the subterranean technocrats is abolish this division.  (So the film reveals itself, for better or worse, as a movie version of the 1619 Project.)  Sutherland's villain, who like all movie bad guys has a tendency to harangue, says that the pimp, the "ho", and the drug dealer are just agents of control in the ghetto -- they are part of the project of keeping things orderly in the slum -- and, so, he contemptuously releases them.  Our heroes, however, aren't willing to be coopted in this way.  Fontaine enlists an enemy, now working to defeat the Man, to shoot  him in shoulder -- he ends up in a body-bag in the underground laboratory from which he escapes.  The prostitutes all pretend to be servicing their clients in cars, as per ordinary practice, but, in fact, they are recruiting folks to join the "slave" rebellion.  Of course, the White technocrats who have everything under surveillance think that the ghetto-dwellers are just going about their ordinary pathologies of existence -- dealing drugs, diverting themselves with illicit sex, attending evangelical church meetings, and the like.  But, in fact, our trio of heroes are fomenting a rebellion.  In a parade of pimp-mobiles, the gangsters attack a local convenience store, find an elevator concealed behind the cooler stocking 40 ounce malt-liquors, and descend into the underworld where they are met by Fontaine.  All hell breaks loose.  This is the point at which the film ventures into the imagery of a race war -- but, as if conscious of the dangers implicit in this imagery, the film softens the violence.  The Black rebels simply chase around the white-coated scientists in their laboratories and don't seem to harm any of them -- remarkable restraint, it seems, in the light of the fact that the White technocrats are experimenting on, and, even, torturing, Black victims.  (For instance, the technocrats are engineering ways to increase "Black on Black crime" by having hapless African-Americans beat each other to pulp.)  YoYo has been captured and is the victim of an experiment in hair-straightening intended to dose her brain with mind-control chemicals -- but the scientists fail to influence her since she is wearing an elaborate wig on which they are spraying the psychogenic agents.  As it happens, the big Boss is Black himself, a man who has bought into the notion that "assimilation is better than annihilation" and seems to be a genetic engineer -- he's trying to manipulate genes to turn African-Americans into White people.  Kiefer Sutherland's malign White supremacist gets his brains blown out -- the only white villain who gets his comeuppance.  The army of naked clones (whose role in the scheme is unclear) emerge blinking and confused into the light of day, apparently, liberated.  (As I write this note, a naked African American woman, much visible on footage salaciously shown on cable news shows, appeared suddenly on the freeway in LA where she took potshots at passing cars with her 45.  So maybe there's something to this movie.)  The film ends enigmatically with clones emerging from underground in Los Angeles -- we see palm trees above the mean streets of the ghetto.  A thug called Tyrone is watching TV and sees himself emerging naked into the light of day -- hence, the film's title, which has been hitherto unexplained.  

The movie is stylish and the Elizabethan-tinged ghetto jargon expertly spoken.  The movie is brilliantly shot showing the ghetto at night as a maze of alleys, lurid motels and vacant warehouse districts infested with whores -- everything is greenish with purple highlights.  (The Glen, as it is called, is supposed to be West Memphis, I think -- YoYo keeps talking about escaping the place for Memphis.)  And the film's fundamental allegorical elements seem sound -- but the several objectives of the bad guys don't mesh into any coherent plot:  are they trying to abolish Blackness by genetic interventions (suggesting that the pathologies of the Ghetto are the product of nature, a racist proposition) or are the villains merely seeking to control a potentially insurgent population by encouraging vice?   (This latter theme reminds me of the opening act of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in which Levee bemoans the fact that Black folk have been amusing themselves to death for generations.) The film is overtly racist and if made by a White director would induce cataclysmic backlash -- see, for instance, the scenes in the fried chicken emporium, the parody of the Black church and the continuous use of what is euphemistically called "the N- word"; the film's subtitles portray the word as "Nigga" but it's pretty obvious what is being said here.  There's half of a good movie here.  But the Netflix executives, I think, were concerned about the inflammatory nature of the imagery and soften the picture's political agenda -- they play things for comedy that aren't comic at all.