Are the days of the week simply too difficult for Ice Cube to
remember? Is differentiating Monday from Friday from Wednesday (okay,
Wednesday is a BITCH to spell) more tedious for the Cube than the rest
of us? Is that why he agreed to be in this gigantic pile of poo? To
help him arrange his Google Calendar?
And don’t even get me started on whom Tracy Morgan must have pissed
off to have been wrangled into this crap. (The mob, maybe? Hillary
Clinton? Maybe he hurt her feelings?)
There’s no justification for this level of dumb: Durell (Ice Cube)
and LeeJohn (Morgan) are junior criminals on the fast track to doing
some hard time. After a bungled theft leaves them in debt to some
fearsome Jamaican gangsters (yes, really), they decide to rob their
local church. But instead of cash, they end up with something way more
valuable: redemption.
For example! In what’s probably the most uncomfortable moment ever
captured on film, Sister Doris (played by Loretta Devine, from
Boston Public—and actually, now that I think about, like
everyone from Boston Public is in this, for some reason.
Except for Seven of Nine. She’s not in it. Big mistake, Hollywood!)
sings a hymnal-y happy birthday song to a tearful LeeJohn.
Squirmy.
First Sunday is supposedly a “comedy” with an “uplifting
moral message.” It also has guns, so I guess guns are supposed to be
funny here, too, along with the film’s other ha-ha subjects, like
homophobia, misogyny, and how hilarious fat women are. Certainly, Chi
McBride—playing the church’s imprisoned pastor—is supposed
to be funny, but he isn’t. He spends the entire movie duct taped to a
chair, though, and I never laughed once. Maybe I’d have cracked a smile
if he’d been floating around the room like Baron Harkonnen in
Dune. But only then, and then only if he was caressing a winged,
underpant-clad Tracy Morgan. MAYBE THEN.