Tracy Morgan, left, and Ice Cube play bumbling crooks who rob a church in First Sunday.

SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT / TRACY BENNETT

In First Sunday, Ice Cube, who seems to crank out a couple of forgettable but very profitable pictures every year, takes out some box-office insurance by surrounding himself with fan-favorites Tracy Morgan (of 30 Rock) as his sidekick, and Katt Williams (the standup star of HBO’s Pimp Chronicles specials).

That combination will likely make for a big opening weekend. Yet even the mega-watt presences of Morgan and Williams, who overshadow Cube himself and can rouse big laughs from not-too-discriminating audiences by doing nothing much, don’t fire up this broadly played, light-humored caper comedy into anything more than an amusing time killer.

Cube’s Durell Washington and Morgan’s Leejohn Jackson are a pair of lunkhead losers who bring calamity after calamity upon themselves. At the start of the film they lose a van full of stolen wheelchairs they were transporting for a Jamaican mob; now the mob wants $1,200 for the chairs … or else. Meanwhile, Cube’s ex-girlfriend is threatening to move away from Baltimore to Atlanta with their son if she doesn’t get $17,000 to pay the rent on a hair salon that has been her livelihood.

What to do?

Why, they rob the local church, which has just raked in big bucks from its First Sunday collection.

Unfortunately for the guys, about 10 members of the congregation are still inside the church when they break in one evening. Even worse, the safe containing what they thought would be tens of thousands of dollars is empty. Because they’ve deduced that one of the congregants still inside the church has stolen the money, they hold all of them there, grilling them until one confesses. It’s sort of like the final scenes of those 1930s drawing room mysteries when Charlie Chan/Bulldog Drummond/The Falcon went down the line of suspects. Only here it’s played for marginal laughs. One of the funniest lines comes at a tense moment when one character says, “I want to see Jesus, too. But I don’t want to see him tonight.”

Nevertheless, Jesus soon does come in the guise of some of the beatific churchgoers who try to persuade Durell and Leejohn to mend their ways before it’s too late and the gates of hell open unto them. Well, they don’t actually say all that, but it’s implied. Will they mend their ways? Well, this is a PG-13 film after all.

Morgan is an engaging livewire who keeps the film on a light tone, counterbalanced by Williams, who overplays his fey choir director bit to the hilt, much to the delight of a preview audience, which found his broad-based comedy a hot ticket. And Cube is, well, Cube, getting lost in the antics of the others by trying to play it straight.

The Jamaicans return a couple of times, but, in what should have been a pivotal moment, they just fade away. Writer-director David E. Talbert said he shot First Sunday in Baltimore because he knows the city well. Curiously, however, there’s no feel at all for that quirky burg. There was more of a sense of Baltimore in the recent movie version of Hairspray, most of which was filmed in Toronto.

**First Sunday

Starring: Ice Cube, Katt Williams, Tracy Morgan, Loretta Devine, Michael Beach, Keith David, Regina Hall, Malinda Williams, Chi McBride.

Rated: PG-13, contains mild profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com