First Sunday
Ice Cube, Katt Williams, Tracy Morgan
Rickey Smiley, Chi McBride, Tiffany Pollard
Written / directed David E. Talbert
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment 2008
98 minutes
First Sunday is a pretty bad and stupid comedy. If you want to be entertained and laugh a bit at an original enough story and a few pretty imaginative situations, this DVD will kind of deliver. That’s about it though and not often enough.
The plot is thinner than Chi McBride’s hair and just a set-up for various sometimes comic situations and a couple of good sight gags.
Durell (Ice Cube) and LeeJohn (Morgan) are two good-for-not-much guys. LeeJohn is the get rich quick schemer and Durell the down on his luck basically good guy.
LeeJohn owes twelve grand to some Jamaican while Durell needs to find money to make sure his ex-wife stays in town with his kid.
It takes a while but they decide the solution is to take the money from the church building fund. If you know why Steve Harvey made fun of the church building fund on Kings of Comedy, you know the problem with that plan and why the guys end up taking the church board hostage. This is where First Sunday could have used some tighter writing and more of a plot for it spins its wheels for a while here.
This is not the only flaw. The massage parlor scene is totally useless. The scene where Durrell and LeeJohn walk into the church while the choir is singing is too long; there is only so much of choir director Katt Williams dancing like a chicken a viewer can take.
First Sunday is very heavy handed with why Durell decides to go through with the robbery. His change of personality during the crime is also unbelievable.
The ending is simply unbelievable, even for a Hollywood movie.
Pretty much everybody in this Black comedy gives a solid performance with not much of nothing to go on. Not to pick on stand-up comic Katt Williams but a bit too much space is given to his rather one-dimensional character.
Special features include a commentary track with writer director David E Talbert and, no, he does not apologize for his ham fisted writing.
More interesting is the Almighty Version which is background information about scenes and so on in subtitles.