‘They Cloned Tyrone’ Ending Explained: Why Did They Clone Tyrone?
Welcome to the Ending Explained for “They Cloned Tyrone,” a new mystery comedy film releasing on Netflix this weekend. The film is written and directed by Juel Taylor and stars John Boyega, Teyonah Parris, and Jamie Foxx. The film mixes comedy with the conspiratorial vein that is so popular right now in fiction and reality, and the result is an adventure that feels very much chaotic and hilarious at the same time. For better or worse, the movie moves at a very strange pace, but while a couple of sections could use better pacing, the movie is still a great watch.
Teyonah Parris shows her range by being hilarious, charming, and charismatic, coming from her more serious role in WandaVision, from which more people will be familiar with her. Jamie Foxx also kills it in his role, and you can see why he made it big in the first place. The actor knows how to be hilarious and serious at the right moments and with the right intensity, making his character memorable. However, John Boyega is left in a sort of limbo, where his character is anything but charismatic or worth following around. The film also wears this blaxploitation aesthetic, which will satisfy a section of the audience.
The following paragraphs contain spoilers for They Cloned Tyrone. Read at your own risk.
Why Did They Clone Tyrone?
They Cloned Tyrone begins with the introduction of one of our main characters, a drug leader named Fontaine. Fontaine lives alone with his mother and deals with drugs to make money. This seems to be his only source of income. Fontaine gets involved in an incident where he breaks another dealer’s leg for selling in his territory. Fontaine acts all tough, but you can see he has some very deep issues.
After collecting less money than usual that week, Fontaine meets a pimp named Slick Charles, who owes him the money. Slick gives Fontaine all his money and asks for more time, as his prostitutes are not making enough money.
Fontaine goes out to the street, and there he is, intercepted by the dealer who broke his leg and his boss. They kill Fontaine right there, but something strange happens; Fontaine wakes up the next morning as if nothing had happened. When Fontaine returns to Slick for the money, Slick thinks he has seen a ghost. Fontaine is supposed to be dead, but he is right there in his room.
It is here that we meet Yo-yo, one of Slick’s prostitutes. She is quite smart, and together they follow the clues to a house with a secret lab in the basement. It is there that Fontaine discovers his clone. He really died, and now he lives through his clone. They leave, but many questions remain.
As the movie progresses, we start to see that there is a secret organization manipulating everything that happens inside this black neighborhood. It is quite sketchy and creepy. The lab at the house is not the only one.
They discover that the local fried chicken place puts something in the kitchen that makes everyone smile and feel happy when they eat it. Explaining in this way why there exists a stereotype of black people loving fried chicken. The same happens with grape juice and even the chemicals women use in their hair when trying to turn it straight.
It seems like every single black stereotype is, in fact, something that comes from the manipulation of this organization. The fact that Fontaine is a drug leader, Slick a pimp, and Yo-yo, a prostitute is also because of it. Underneath the chicken place, they discover a massive installation with hundreds of scientists and workers who spend 24/7 developing all these products to manipulate black people.
The trio escapes the facility, but they are intercepted by a man who serves as a cleaner for the organization. He explains that the organization aims to keep black people docile so that the fracture after Emancipation doesn’t become bigger and destroy the United States of America.
Who Is Tyrone?
The man lets the trio live, so they can return to their normal lives and continue fulfilling their roles. However, things are different now. Fontaine’s reality has been shattered. His memories of his baby brother dying are not his own. He feels like he isn’t even real anymore.
Slick, who also discovered he is just a clone, is also having a mental crisis. Yo-yo is the only one who still wants to break the whole thing down and expose everything to the public. She tries to convince the guys to help, but they are too depressed, so she does it alone, but sadly, she is captured.
Fontaine recovers after realizing that, while it is true that he is a clone, he still has the chance to create his own future. He goes to Slick, and together they start searching for Yo-yo. It seems impossible, but Slick has a plan. Fontaine returns to the dealer who killed him at the movie’s start and asks him to do the same.
Only this time, the shot is not fatal, and he only has to wait for the organization to return his corpse to the facility. They do, and Fontaine, once inside, opens the doors so that Slick and his allies, all the drug dealers, can enter the facility.
Slick rescues Yo-yo, and Fontaine finally meets the man in charge of the operation, his original. The original Fontaine explains that they have been doing this for decades and that the project’s final goal is to turn black people into white people.
That way, there will be no racial tension in the United States because they will all be of the same race. Assimilation is better than destruction. Fontaine is unconvinced and uses a trigger word to make one of his clones kill the original. The trio destroys the facility and sets free hundreds of clones outside, naked and confused.
The event becomes national news. Fontaine, Slick, and Yo-yo reunite once again, and Fontaine decides that it is time to change things, so he wants to travel and suggests that Slick and Yo-yo go with him. They accept. The film ends with us seeing another clone of Fontaine in another city in the United States.
We see that this clone does the same things as Fontaine, but when he sees the news on TV and sees a clone of himself in there, he realizes that the clone news is real. This is the titular Tyrone from the title. Proving that the scale of the project was really something huge.
