We’ve seen so many movies and TV series set in a dystopian future where the exact year is splashed across the screen with a giant graphic, and so much time-travel fare that tells us exactly where we’ve landed on the time continuum — but as we’re settling in for the first few scenes of director/co-writer Juel Taylor’s audacious, original, bold, hilarious and whip-smart sci-fi social satire “They Cloned Tyrone,” it’s impossible to nail down the place and time.
Judging by the grainy lensing, the clothing and the hair styles, the songs on the soundtrack, the gas-guzzling GM vehicles, the furniture and the land lines, the discussion of “SpongeBob SquarePants” as if it’s a new thing, we gotta be more than two decades in the past, right? Ah, but then a sex worker named Yo-Yo (Teyonah Paris) is telling her, um, supervisor, Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), about some investment opportunities she’s been considering, and she says: “Blockchain. That’s right, mother------, blockchain. … Cryptocurrency’s a bubble, everybody knows that. But blockchain? Oh, that s--- the future.”
