Netflix's latest comedy, Ladies First, has been panned as a painfully dated and embarrassingly star-packed sexism comedy. The film, which imagines a world with flipped gender politics, has been criticised for its one-joke premise and inconsistent world-building. Despite a talented cast including Rosamund Pike and Sacha Baron Cohen, the film fails to deliver anything smart or sharp, instead hammering home the same point ad nauseam.
Rosamund Pike, known for her indelible performance in Gone Girl, is wasted in a role that sees her playing a put-upon single mother turned ruthless executive. Sacha Baron Cohen, meanwhile, is jarringly miscast as Damien Sachs, a sexist man about town who learns the error of his ways after bumping his head and waking up in a world where women are on top. His performance is described as flat, confused, and deeply uncomfortable, bringing the film down even further.
The film's magical conceit sees Damien navigating a world where bras are for balls, Five Guys is Five Gals, and he is now a sexually harassed and underestimated cog at his advertising agency. With help from Richard E Grant's magical pigeon-strewn hobo, some humility, and a penile implant, he must take on Pike's character without the system on his side. However, the script is more intent on clumsily pointing out gender stereotypes than actually having anything funny to say.
Ladies First sits alongside other fantastical 'what if?' comedies that collapse under the weight of their one-joke premises. Even at a barely there 84-minute length, the film is the worst example of this in recent memory, taking an undeniable real-world issue and painting a cartoonishly broad-strokes picture that becomes smugly repetitive and utterly useless. The film is a remake of a French comedy also owned by Netflix, which feels about as inventive a justification for being as the streamer reusing IP just because.
