Ladies First (2026) – Dull

Released: 22nd May
Seen: 26th May

“Man learns what it’s like to be a woman” is a classic story that film has used countless times to explore the complex issues between the sexes. This was perhaps done most bluntly in the film What Women Want, a cheesy film from the year 2000 that featured Mel Gibson as a sexist advertising executive who ends up getting the strange power to hear women’s thoughts, which he ends up using to further his career while learning about how hard it is for the opposite gender and improving as a man. Well, now we get Ladies First, which is kind of like What Women Want if it wasn’t that funny and didn’t have the nerve to actually really discuss the issues it brings up, but it can make a lot of unfunny jokes about balls… so that’s something.

Ladies First revolves around Damian Sachs (Sacha Baron Cohen), a sexist advertising executive who struts around the advertising company Atlas as if he owns the place, even though he isn’t the CEO yet. Begrudgingly, he ends up promoting Alex Fox (Rosamund Pike), a woman who got the job because the company needed to make a woman an executive to look good. To speed this up, Damian does some sexist bullshit, bumps his head and falls over unconscious, but wakes up in a world where women are the ones in charge. Cut to a series of basic attempts to point out the sexist things that women have to deal with and some halfhearted attempt at commentary before we end up at the point where Damian learns how to not be a sexist prick anymore because the film tells us he isn’t sexist anymore… because if the film didn’t explicitly tell you what it was doing, you wouldn’t have a fucking clue.

The universal rule of cinema, the thing that any good movie will do without having to even bother thinking about it, is “Show, don’t tell”. Unfortunately, Ladies First is a Netflix movie, and Netflix allegedly has told everyone who works for them to assume the audience isn’t watching the film, so multiple times throughout the film, someone will just explicitly state what we’re meant to understand. We know Damian is an asshole because a voice-over tells us he’s an asshole, not even showing him as that big an asshole for it to be noteworthy among the other men of the company (who are all just as bad, but it’s only Damian that gets the ‘live in a misandrist world’ treatment). We know that he can only leave the women’s world if he gets to the top of the company because a character explicitly tells us that he can only leave if he gets to the top of the company, even though getting to be CEO of his company does nothing for his character arc… or at least, the arc that they clearly want to tell you he has because the film ends by a character looking directly into camera and telling you he’s actually fine now. Ladies First refuses to show instead of tell, it’ll tell and then kinda show a half-assed version of what it just told you, and hopefully that’ll do the job.

Indeed, Ladies First is a pretty half-assed affair with only a few moments that raise so much as a chuckle. They come close to actually making some good points, showing the issues of how women are treated in the workplace or how sexual harassment is everywhere, but it really doesn’t make them seem that bad in this situation. Damian never really feels uncomfortable that he’s being flirted with all the time, except in one scene where it’s clear his discomfort isn’t with the flirting but with the woman doing it being older. It tries to put this man in the same situation every woman you’ve ever known has been in, but it doesn’t work because he just doesn’t react to it, if anything, Damian seems to feel like being catcalled is a compliment. Hell, the big makeover scene where they try to turn him into some muscle hunk that all the women would want to lust over doesn’t work because, frankly, it’s barely a change from how he normally looks. That’s not a compliment. Sacha Baron Cohen is the wrong person for this role on many levels, but especially one where we’re meant to buy that his ‘glow up’ made him attractive to all the women in the company.

Indeed, speaking of Sacha Baron Cohen, it feels like he’s checked out this entire time and nothing about his performance works. This is a man who we have seen dive so far into a character that it’s almost dangerous and this is him cashing a paycheck. He’s meant to be playing a cruel, sexist asshole who is so obviously bad that he needs to be taken to a whole new world to learn a lesson but he never feels any worse than anyone else. He’s an asshole because we’re told he’s an asshole, that’s the end of it. We’ve seen films set up a complete asshole who has to go through a change countless times, from Ebenezer Scrooge to the two leads in Dicks! The Musical. It’s a character archetype we know well and if anyone could do it, it should be Sacha Baron Cohen but he just doesn’t, he delivers a half-assed lead performance that’s not hateable enough for us to want to see him suffer and not interesting enough for us to give a damn. We follow him because Ladies First has decided he’s the lead character, that’s about it.

Fitting the half-assed theme is how Ladies First will just run right past its most interesting ideas to get them out of the way in under a minute. Damian trying to sleep his way to the top is played as one joke scene and barely gets acknowledged the second the scene is over. The issues involving the character of Fred Powell (Charles Dance) – who is apparently just as bad as Damian or worse – just get swept under the rug and then there’s an entire ‘wrongful termination lawsuit’ situation that could lend itself to having the most pointed critique of the way women are treated, and it’s over in two minutes without anything of note being said. It’s like the film is scared of its own ideas; it just has to get to the end in about 90 minutes so anything that could actually be interesting or make a point or offer a chance for some jokes must be thrown aside so we can just end this fucking thing. It’s a film scared of its own idea, not wanting to actually deal with the topic at hand but just make obvious shitty ‘jokes’ that wear thin after a few minutes.

Perhaps the only people who really seemed to understand the potential for what could be done here was the art department who end up actually getting to have fun with some of their background gags, little things like a fast food bag for Burger Queen or an ad that’d normally feature barely covered boobs now featuring a bare man’s ass actually plays with the idea of putting men in the uncomfortable place of being objectified like women are and showing the subtle ways that men are elevated in society. It does a better job of making the point than the actual script for this film, which just can’t seem to get it to work. Hell, looking back to What Women Want, when the film starring Mel Gibson of all people does a better job of handling the topic of sexism, you’ve really fucked up.

Ladies First wants so hard to make a point but it’s so dull that it ends up being pointless, a watered-down attempt to show off how the world panders to men that can’t even bring itself to actually do anything interesting with that idea. Full of performers who should be better than this, Ladies First misses the mark in many ways. It’s not smart, it’s not funny, it’s not interesting and it’s just not good. At best, it stumbles upon a laugh through sheer dumb luck every now and then but it feels like a fluke more often than not. It could’ve and should’ve been so much more, but it looks like no one had the balls to actually try.