Star rating: ***
Dir: David E Talbert
With: Ice Cube, Tracy Morgan

Ice Cube reprises his down- on-his-luck small-time crook character from the Friday film series he wrote, produced and starred in. Though this is not, strictly speaking, another sequel to Friday, Next Friday and Friday After Next, Cube's decent but unlucky Baltimore homeboy Durell Washington is a close cousin of the endlessly hassled Los Angeles petty thief character of those cult comedies.

Here Cube teams up with 30 Rock star Tracy Morgan, playing the straight man to Morgan's Lee John Jackson, a motormouth dimwit who gets his pal into one scrape after another with the law and the lawless. In debt to a tough Jamaican gangster and serving 5000 hours community service for receiving stolen goods (wheelchairs), Lee John convinces Durell (who needs to raise dough to keep his estranged ex and his beloved son from leaving town for good) to rob the local church of its maintenance fund-raising cash.

Well-intentioned but predict-able, First Sunday benefits from the likeable performances of its alternately easy-going and uptight leading men. But one would have liked a brighter script and less pedestrian direction from David E. Talbert, who here makes his film debut after spending the last 15 years working in stage plays and musicals. Perhaps we'll see improvement in a follow-up - Second Saturday?