Ladies First

Grade: C-

Ladies First begins with voiceover narration proclaiming, “As we know, in this world, it’s often the very worst people who seem to have it all.” It’s referring to Sacha Baron Cohen’s character, a sexist advertising executive who suffers a head injury and wakes up in an alternate reality where women run the world and men are treated the way men like his character treat women. The concept is straightforward, and it offers plenty of opportunities for satire.

To the film’s credit, some of those opportunities pay off. I found myself looking forward to the various gender-swapped brands, books, and cultural references. Burger Queen. Victor’s Secret. Harriet Potter. The Lady of the Rings. Donna Quixote. A prayer concludes “in the name of the mother, the daughter, and the Holy Ghost. A-women.” Those moments display a level of creativity that the rest of the movie struggles to maintain.

My favorite gag is when Rosamund Pike’s character asks Baron Cohen if it’s his “time of the week,” meaning whether men get irritable if they don’t “take care of things” regularly. I also liked a news headline about “meninists” chanting “my sperm, my choice” at protests. The film occasionally brushes against sharper ideas about how gendered rhetoric sounds when flipped, including things like “not all women, but always a woman” or the infamous “choose the bear over the woman” argument when reframed in reverse. In theory, that’s where the concept could have really taken off. But the movie doesn’t seem to have the ovaries to follow through with these ideas. It hints at them, then backs away before they become truly uncomfortable. I also noticed Pike’s character’s daughter is portrayed differently depending on which version of the world we’re in. I rewound to earlier scenes to confirm I wasn’t imagining it. It’s clever.

The problem is that Ladies First mistakes repetition for comedy. Once the movie establishes its premise, it spends the rest of its running time making the same point over and over again. We understand the message almost immediately. The screenplay, however, seems convinced that we don’t. Every scene exists to reinforce the same lesson, usually with all the subtlety of a brick through a window.

That wouldn’t necessarily be fatal if the film were consistently funny, but it isn’t. Much of the humor consists of watching Baron Cohen’s character experience the same frustrations that women have traditionally experienced in male-dominated environments. A montage set to The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” has him getting his pubic hair waxed, cutting back and forth between reactions and his own high-pitched squeals. It wasn’t funny the first time, much less the fifth or sixth. The movie becomes less interested in generating laughs than in making sure nobody misses the point.

What frustrated me most is that the premise had real potential, and in many ways it is the only consistently entertaining part of the film. The alternate world is more interesting than anything that happens inside the story built around it. Every new gender-flipped product, celebrity, or cultural touchstone lands better than the actual plot. From the moment Baron Cohen wakes up in this reality, we already know where it’s going: he will learn empathy, return to his own world, and emerge a changed man, Ebenezer Scrooge style. The only question is how long it takes to get there.

For me, it took too long. I spent much of the second half waiting for the inevitable conclusion rather than enjoying the journey. Ladies First wants to be both a broad comedy and a social commentary, but it never fully succeeds at either. It keeps circling the same idea until the entertainment value starts to drain out of it, and the idea itself stops landing as effectively as it should.

The intent is understandable. A role-reversal comedy like this is clearly trying to force a kind of empathy—asking what happens when familiar attitudes are turned back on the people who usually experience them. But the execution never quite trusts that idea enough to let it breathe. Instead of letting the premise speak for itself, it keeps underlining it.

Something in society that consistently makes me sad is the opposite gender bashing. I’ve seen hurtful, hateful comments from both sides. We’re all in this together. Our lives began the same way on this tiny blue planet that’s hurling through the universe. We’re on the same side. Our equipment is almost identical. We’re only here for 80 years or so. Let’s work together and build each other up.

In the end, it feels less like a sharp satire and more like a sketch stretched into a feature that never finds a second gear. The premise is clever. The execution is not. What could have been a biting, uncomfortable comedy settles for repeating its own joke until it runs out of steam. Ladies First will not go down in herstory as one of Netflix’s better offerings.

Grade: C-