Netflix’s Ladies First Movie arrives as a broad, chintzy comedy that would have felt old hat even in the 2000s, according to a review published on Thursday. The 84-minute film sends Sacha Baron Cohen’s Damien Sachs into a world where gender politics are reversed after he bumps his head and wakes up to find women on top and men scrambling to keep up.
That switch sends Damien from top dog at an advertising agency to a sexually harassed, underestimated smaller cog, while Rosamund Pike’s Alex moves from being patronised to becoming a powerful executive. The review says the film takes a real workplace issue — women being undervalued and underpaid — and hammers the point home repeatedly rather than trusting the joke to land once.
The setup is familiar enough to feel like a callback to a particular strand of British comedy from the 2000s, the era of Sex Lives of the Potato Men, Three and Out, Fat Slags and Lesbian Vampire Killers. The review places Ladies First Movie in Netflix’s effort to revive that style of comedy, and compares it with What Women Want, I Feel Pretty, Good Fortune and Isn’t It Romantic, the last of which shares co-writer Katie Silberman with this film.
There is at least one detail the review singles out as memorable: Richard E Grant appears as a magical pigeon-strewn hobo. But the larger problem is the film’s insistence on driving home the same point again and again, with the gender-flip premise doing most of the work and the script rarely finding a sharper angle than the one the opening sets up.
That leaves Ladies First Movie with a clear answer to the question the review raises from the start: the film is not a fresh take on workplace sexism, but a familiar one dressed in a worn-out comic gimmick. The mirror it holds up may reflect a real problem, yet the review’s judgment is that the reflection is so overlit and so repeatedly explained that it loses much of its sting.
