What’s better than one John Boyega? Many John Boyegas.
Directed by Juel Taylor and supported by a stellar cast that includes the likes of John Boyega, Teyonah Parris, Jamie Foxx, and Kiefer Sutherland, They Cloned Tyrone presents a thought-provoking, enticing, and hilarious sci-fi mystery that seems to be very well inspired from Jordan Peele‘s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019). While the Netflix movie does not take much time before throwing its first curveball at the viewer, the ending of They Cloned Tyrone reveals a bigger mystery that may be explored in a potential sequel, in case Netflix believes there’s more to explore in the world presented by this science-fiction comedy mystery thriller.
‘They Cloned Tyrone’ Story Summary
They Cloned Tyrone takes off with local drug dealer Fontaine (John Boyega), accompanied by the young Junebug, taking down the peddler of the opposing gang, led by Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson). After hitting the peddler with his car, Fontaine ensures that he leaves him with a warning to take it back to his boss Isaac. As a reward, Junebug gets five dollars for snitching on the peddler although he doesn’t seem to be content with his reward.
Later, in the evening, Fontaine sets out in his car to find the pimp, Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), who owes him money for the drugs he bought from Fontaine. However, upon reaching the motel where Charles was holed up, Charles pretends that the drugs did not work. Seeing right through Charles’ strategy, Fontaine goes on to check Charles’ motel room and finds some money, which satisfies his immediate need. On seeing himself losing his money, Charles tries to act tough but eventually, gives up in the end.
Fontaine Experiences Immediate Reincarnation
Just as Fontaine sits in his care to head back home, Isaac arrives at the location and shoots multiple bullets at Fontaine. Although, with the last bit of energy in his body, Fontaine tries to drive away in his car, he struggles to achieve success and his death is confirmed by Isaac with a string of more bullets. When Slick Charles comes out of his motel, he finds the bloodied and lifeless body of Fontaine.
Surprisingly, in the morning, Fontaine wakes up from what seems to have been a shocking dream, to realize that he is safe and sound. After a seemingly normal day, Fontaine visits Slick Charles again. Much to the shock of Charles, he expresses disbelief at seeing Fontaine alive after having witnessed him being shot six times the previous night. To check up on Charles’ theory, Fontaine picks up Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), a prostitute he met to find Charles’ location, before being shot in his dream. Fontaine questions Yo-Yo about him seeing her the previous night and whether she heard shots being fired. Yo-Yo confirms that she heard shots being fired and noticed a familiar car leaving, by the time she reached the spot.
Despite her wish to go on with her business, Fontaine forces Yo-Yo to tag along with him and Charles while they go on a ride across the neighborhood to find the perpetrators who allegedly attacked Fontaine. Quickly enough, Fontaine finds the car parked alongside a house and decides to break into the house to find the ones responsible. The trio soon realizes that the place is a trap house. On looking further, Fontaine finds an elevator, which completely seems out-of-place with the rest of the house. Yo-Yo gets on the elevator in a bid to explore more, and out of intrigue, Yo-Yo decides to join him. When left without a choice, Charles also ends up following Yo-Yo and Fontaine.
The elevator takes the group to a chemical lab where they come across the lab technician who accidentally gets shot by Charles after he sneezes in a cocaine-looking powder that leaves him laughing involuntarily. When Yo-Yo and Charles hurry toward Fontaine to leave the crime scene quickly, they find him standing absolutely shocked as the three witness the dead body of Fontaine lying right in front of them. Still shocked, the group lands at Yo-Yo’s house where Yo-Yo convinces Fontaine to let the heat settle down before returning to the house to find out more about the place.
The Truth Behind The Conspiracy In ‘They Cloned Tyrone’
When Yo-Yo and Slick Charles wake up the next day, they find that Fontaine has been long gone. Along with his gang of friends, Fontaine arrives at the house from the previous night to dig deeper into the mystery behind what he had witnessed. However, to his surprise, Fontaine finds that the place has transformed completely, and he returns to Yo-Yo’s house to share his discovery. Losing control over his hunger, Charles urges the group to head to a local eatery to brainstorm ideas while they try to work out the mystery lurking around them.
At the chicken outlet, Charles notices something weird when everybody around him, including Yo-Yo and Fontaine, starts laughing profusely, bringing memories of the previous night back to him. The laughing reminds Charles of his own laughing when he consumed the white powder found in the laboratory. He quickly makes out that it was eating the chicken that was making them laugh.
To dig deeper, Yo-Yo takes the mantle and seduces the manager of the eatery. In the backroom, Yo-Yo finds a recording that mentions a compound being tested on a control group. She also notices the many television boxes kept in the room and quickly realizes that every part of their neighborhood is being kept under surveillance. As they keep looking for the truth behind the usage of a mysterious substance being used in everything in the neighborhood from food to hair color, the group finds only more confusion coming their way.
Trailing a van being used to transport a grape drink ridden with the mysterious substance, the group arrives at a church frequented by Blacks. Using a fancy keycard found in the back of the van, they manage to access another elevator similar to the one they found at the trap house earlier. This time, the elevator leads them to a massive underground facility located below their neighborhood of Glen.
Kiefer Sutherland Leaves Fontaine To “Survive”
They soon find themselves losing their minds when they understand that it is a testing facility where Whites have been trapping the Blacks in Glen to run experiments on them. Against their first impression that the facility is being used to keep real people trapped for experiments, the trio discovers that the facility also contains a storage room for clones of the people living in the neighborhood, including Fontaine and Yo-Yo. When Fontaine loses his calm at witnessing what’s nothing less of a nightmare and shoots at his own clone, the action leaves the alarms ringing, forcing Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Charles to escape.
The group’s brief escape attempt is intercepted when Nixon (Kiefer Sutherland) is sent by the higher-ups of the facility to stop the three from wreaking havoc on their experiments. Without revealing much, Nixon establishes that they have been using people like Fontaine, who’s a drug dealer, and Charles, who’s a pimp, to keep the neighborhood balanced. It seems that the mysterious organization behind the facility dictates everything that goes down in the neighborhood, including the crimes that go down. When Fontaine tries to dig out the truth from Nixon using force, another shock hits the trio as they realize that they do not even have control of their own bodies.
At his will, Nixon takes control of Fontaine’s body and dictates his moves through his words, placing a choice between opting for death and returning to regular lives, in front of Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Charles. It becomes clear, by this point, when he chooses to spare the lives of the three rebels, that Nixon only carries out the orders given to him. It’s revealed that the existing versions of Fontaine and Charles are clones made in a laboratory. The organization Nixon works for placed Fontaine’s clone back in the neighborhood because he’s a crucial cog in the machinery of the neighborhood.
‘They Cloned Tyrone’ Ending: Who Is Behind The Cloning Experiment?
Realizing the extent of his powerlessness, Fontaine decides to go back to his old life, despite Yo-Yo’s insistence that they should do something to stop the ones controlling their lives. Even without Fontaine and Charles’ help, Yo-Yo continues playing Nancy Drew, a character that fuelled her dream of becoming a journalist. But Yo-Yo’s investigation gets out of control, and Nixon decides to put an end to it, trapping Yo-Yo to make her the subject of an ongoing experiment. Realizing that Yo-Yo has been kidnapped, Slick Charles and Fontaine decide to rescue Yo-Yo, thanks to Charles’ ingenious plan.
To pave Fontaine’s way into the secret facility, Charles comes up with the plan of taking Fontaine’s rival gangster Isaac’s help. Isaac assists in their plan by making it look like that Fontaine has been shot by him, but in reality, Fontaine is only shot in the shoulder. However, the perception that Fontaine has been killed helps provide easy access to the laboratory for Fontaine.
On the other hand, Charles gathers the entire neighborhood to wreak havoc on the secret underground facility. After infiltrating the facility, Fontaine provides easy access to Charles and his friends to lead a rampage. While Yo-Yo and Charles go head-to-head with Nixon, Fontaine finds himself in a more difficult fight against his own clone Chester, Nixon’s henchman. Chester takes an injured Fontaine and presents him in front of the man running the operations of the facility, delivering another shock to Fontaine.
In the end, it’s revealed that Fontaine has been the one leading the facility’s operations and experiments. The lead geneticist at the facility turns out to be the real, much older Fontaine, who created his own clones, in turn, over the years. All previous versions of Fontaine were clones of the scientist Fontaine who kept a version of himself on the streets. The real Fontaine confesses to his clone that his little brother Ronnie’s death made him sign a pact with the government. Ronnie died when he was shot by a police officer in what was a racial crime.
While Ronnie could have been saved, the apathy of the people in the neighborhood resulted in his death. The scientist Fontaine did not pass on the memory of the conditions, under which Ronnie died, to his clones. But the saddening reality forced him to join hands with the organization on a project that would eventually help remove the genetic difference between people of various Black communities across the United States. The eventual goal remains to phase out Blacks over generations.
Who Is Tyrone In ‘They Cloned Tyrone’?
Finally, with the truth behind the massive cloning experiment out, clone Fontaine realizes the extent of the control the organization behind the facility has. However, using the phrase “Olympia Black”, which Nixon earlier used to take control of Fontaine’s body, clone Fontaine forces Chester to shoot the real Fontaine and manages to put an end to the organization’s operations, at least in the neighborhood of Glen. At the same time, Yo-Yo and Slick Charles also slyly handle Nixon and put a bullet in his head. With both the scientist and Nixon dead, the trapped people are released onto the streets, as the reality of the secret cloning operation makes it to national news, lifting the lid from the experiments that were being conducted beneath Glen for who knows how long.
Free from the shackles of their controlled existence, Fontaine, Yo-Yo, and Slick Charles decide to move to Memphis, possibly in a bid to shut some more facilities where Blacks are cloned. Unbeknownst to the trio, another version of Fontaine wakes up in Los Angeles, and he goes about his day, which seems eerily similar to that lived by Fontaine in Glen. It’s established that many versions of Fontaine (or Tyrone) have been created and placed all across the country. As he sits down with his mates to watch television, Tyrone finds out about his clone on the news. In a final twist, They Cloned Tyrone teases the possibility that maybe Fontaine was himself a clone of Tyrone, just like the movie’s title suggests.
They Cloned Tyrone is now streaming on Netflix.
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