| FIRST SUNDAY |
 2008 - USADirector: David E. Talbert
- Reviewed by Vickie
Williams is at it again in First Sunday and, though he has maybe a dozen lines of dialogue in the entire film, he gets third billing after stars Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan. Unfortunately for Williams, this also means that he’s forever going to be associated with this supreme misfire of a heist comedy, that contains neither a heist nor much comedy. Ice Cube delivers his trademark sneer and one-note "I’m not a thug, I’m a family man!" performance (see also: Are We There Yet? and Are We Done Yet?) as Durell, a divorced dad whose hairdresser wife (Regina Hall) announces that she has to take their son and move to Atlanta because of some weird rent situation at her salon. To be honest, the particulars of the story are all so jumbled and hurried that none of them make sense, so all I can remember is that she owed a whopping $17K and change to a landlord of some sort. Tracy Morgan co-stars as Durell’s best friend LeeJohn... but his name might as well be TracyMorgan because that’s the performance you get. The same one Morgan delivered on SNL, the same one he used on his self-titled sitcom (where he played "Tracy Mitchell"), and the same one he’s currently trotting out as "Tracy Jordan" every week on 30 Rock. Anyway, TracyMorgan gets Durell involved in a bizarre scheme to transport stolen, pimped-out wheelchairs for a Jamaican gangster with the world’s thickest accent. (Seriously, this is an actual plot point in the film.) We, the audience, are reminded several times that there are 10 wheelchairs that cost $1200 each..."You do the math." This get-rich-plan goes awry, our hapless duo are brought before a judge (the always hilarious Keith David) and sentenced to 5000 of community service. While performing that community service (i.e., picking up trash) they see a beautiful woman (Malinda Williams) go into a nearby church... so they follow her inside to the world’s most jubilant and needlessly extended gospel-choir sequence (admittedly one of the few enjoyable moments in the movie)... then they find out the church has an "improvement fund" stashed on the premises... then they decide to rob the place at night... then they arrive to rob the place and discover that a whole whack of people are in the church at, presumably, some ungodly hour... so they take everyone hostage and THEN find out the money they were going to steal is missing, so nobody goes home until the cash is coughed up. Oh, and the Jamaican gangster still wants his money. Now. Look up at how many words it took to describe the story. Look at how much pointless build-up it took just to get Durell and TracyMorgan into the church. And yet, nothing in this entire story makes an ounce of sense. None of it. Start to finish, it’s a mess. Forget logic, there isn’t any. The story turns on a dime several times and without explanation, and the characters are all wildly clichéd, bi-polar and, for the most part, uninteresting. Durell starts out as a relatively upstanding guy looking to make his son proud, even rejecting TracyMorgan’s criminal ideas...but the moment the heist begins, he becomes a gun-wielding badass, manhandling his victims and angrily threatening to shoot children and the elderly. Huh??? Just as quickly, he turns over a new leaf yet again when it suits the plot. Speaking of which, there isn’t one. Two guys rob a church should be straightforward enough, but the script is so tackily bedazzled with useless subplots—there are literally a half-dozen, at least—that it’s the cinematic equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting. Actually, more like the cinematic equivalent of a bad Jackson Pollock knock-off. Heck, one of the hostages—and elderly woman being played by a man—actually DISAPPEARS COMPLETELY halfway through the movie... and no one notices! Where did she go? Did she die? Are we meant to ignore the fact that she’s in the room one minute, and inexplicably gone from the entire film the next?? Oh, and note to every comedy writer or director out there: the whole "gay panic" joke is old and tired and insulting. So quit using it already. Seeing grown men squeal and shriek in disgust that they might have been touched by another man is pathetic, not funny. The final 20 minutes or so are laugh-out-loud, ridiculously bad. So implausible (at least the filmmakers are consistent!) and lame that I groaned out loud..and tacking on some corny voiceover doesn’t help matters. I felt physically embarrassed for supporting players like Chi McBride, Loretta Devine and Michael Beach for having agreed to participate in this lowest-common-denominator film. They are terrific actors and all of them deserve much, much better material than this schlock. Which brings me back to Katt Williams. Bless him, he was the only thing I liked about First Sunday. As poorly coiffed, effeminate choir director Rickey, Williams proves that it’s quality, not quantity, that matters in a performance. Even though he didn’t get much dialogue or screen time, every word out of his mouth—and every second he was on screen—was funny. Too bad the same can’t be said for the rest of First Sunday. I am hoping with every fibre of my being that no one pitches or greenlights Next Sunday. |
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Clearly, Hollywood has realized that dropping Katt Williams into a
spectacularly awful movie might, for a few fleeting moments, make it
watchable. They did it in the otherwise godawful 