Netflix has released Ladies First, a broad and chinty new comedy that imagines a world where gender politics are flipped and the old office hierarchy is turned inside out. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Damien Sachs, a suave but sexist man about town who bumps his head and wakes up in a world where women are on top and men are struggling to keep up.
That reversal is the whole joke, and the film runs it hard for 84 minutes. Damien is suddenly the one being harassed and underestimated at the advertising agency where he once ruled as top dog, while Rosamund Pike’s Alex, a single mother who had been patronised, swans her way to the very top of the corporate ladder.
The setup lands with a blunt point that the review says still matters now: women are still undervalued and underpaid in the workplace. But Ladies First is also described as a revival of the kind of British comedy films that flourished in the 2000s, the sort that leaned on crass reversals and broad embarrassment rather than sharper writing. In that sense, it sits alongside titles such as Sex Lives of the Potato Men, Three and Out, Fat Slags and Lesbian Vampire Killers, while also inviting comparison with gender-swap and wish-fulfilment comedies including What Women Want, I Feel Pretty, Good Fortune and Isn’t It Romantic.
There is a reason the review is so hard on it. It calls the film “an excruciatingly unfunny high-concept thought experiment” and says a misogynist is made to learn the error of his ways in a “painfully dated and embarrassingly star-packed sexism comedy.” It also singles out Cohen’s performance as flat and uncomfortable, saying he does not find the swagger or the softening charm the role needs, even as Pike is described as well-cast in the central female role.
The film’s oddest turns are part of the point. In the reversed world, Paul Smith becomes Pauline, Harry Potter becomes Harriet, bras are for balls and Five Guys is Five Gals. Richard E Grant also appears as a magical pigeon-strewn hobo, in keeping with the film’s urge to turn every idea into a visual gag. Katie Silberman, who is identified as a co-writer of Ladies First and Isn’t It Romantic, helps anchor the project in a familiar lane, but the review argues that the execution never gets beyond the premise.
That leaves the movie in a familiar modern-comedy bind: it wants to make a point about sexism while chasing the comic energy of a world turned upside down, but the review’s judgment is that the gags are stale and the cast cannot rescue them. The sharper answer to the film’s premise is not whether men would cope badly in a matriarchal workplace. It is whether a joke this familiar can still land when the social truth behind it is already obvious.
