ICE Cube goes cold in “First Sunday,” a heist comedy in which the audience gets robbed.
Cube plays a harried, working-class Baltimore dad who needs $17,000 to pay off a debt to his baby mama, who is threatening to leave for Atlanta and take their son with her. Cube’s wacky best friend (Tracy Morgan) keeps getting him fired from jobs, so the two agree to fence some stolen luxury wheelchairs for a gang of Jamaican hoods who threaten to kill the guys if they don’t return with the cash within 24 hours.
Instead, they get in a car chase with the police and allow all the wheelchairs to fall out of their van and roll away. But that’s OK, because by the end of the movie, when many days or maybe weeks have gone by and the Jamaicans still haven’t killed them, it turns out that we weren’t supposed to pay much attention to this story line in the first place.
The two friends wind up humiliated, doing community service in orange jumpsuits (people drop trash near, but never in, the garbage bags they carry). Meanwhile, the best friend, LeeJohn (his mama had two boyfriends at the time he was born, and she wasn’t really sure who the father was, so she named him after both of them) comes up with a dumb idea to make some money: rob a local gospel church at gunpoint.
First, the guys case the joint, though, by stopping by the church during a rousing service and drinking all the sacramental wine. There are a few early laughs, mainly thanks to Morgan’s shtick – rubbery and aggrieved. His little-boy whine can make routine lines like “If I go to jail, they’re gonna make me a woman!” pretty funny. As he shows every week on “30 Rock,” Morgan’s got skills. He does his best with a few sketch-comedy situations.
In the second half, though, the laughs evaporate and things become disturbingly heartwarming. A huge chunk of the movie is set inside the un-air-conditioned church on a sweltering night as the two guys deal with hostages who talk back to them (one of them tells Cube he shouldn’t think of himself as Robin Hood – “not if you are robbin’ the hood”) and try to convince them that they should change their wicked ways. The two guys can’t figure out what to do next, and for about half an hour of screen time, neither can the movie.
FIRST SUNDAY * 1/2 Day of the weak.Running time: 96 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity, sexual humor, drug references). At the E-Walk, the 84th Street, the Orpheum, others.