They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

They Cloned Tyrone arrives dressed as a 1970s genre exercise and turns out to be a treatise wearing a purple felt suit. Juel Taylor, working from a script he wrote with Tony Rettenmaier, sends a drug dealer named Fontaine through a death, a resurrection, and an underground laboratory beneath his own neighborhood. The ensemble is Black from top to bottom, and so is the story being told, which matters here because the casting is load-bearing. John Boyega, Jamie Foxx, and Teyonah Parris carry the film's voice, and the film has no interest in explaining that voice to anyone outside the room.

The satirical target is systemic anti-Black experimentation, rendered as mind control, fried chicken, hair products, and a project to breed Black people into white people. The film gestures toward real abuses of the Tuskegee variety without claiming to document them, and its central argument, assimilation against annihilation, is argued outright in a monologue from the original Fontaine. That is a substantial dose of social consciousness, delivered with a grin and a synthesizer. The economic critique stays thin. The conspiracy preys on the poor because the poor are easy to miss, which is a class observation, not a program.

Teyonah Parris's Yo-Yo frees herself, drives the climax, and retires on her own terms, a feminist register that lands without ever becoming a platform. Everything else is absent. No queer subtext, no climate anxiety, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent characters, and no revision of the historical record, only a fictional homage to a disreputable genre. The sermonizing, such as it is, hides inside the chase sequences, which is the polite way to make a point. The result is a film with something to say and the manners not to say it twice.