Ladies First

Ladies First is an average film with a good idea and not enough to say about it. The premise is funny on paper. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Damien Sachs, a shameless chauvinist advertising executive who gets knocked on the head and wakes up in a parallel world where women are in charge and men are at the bottom. What Women Want meets I Am Not an Easy Man, made for Netflix in 2026. Fine.

The problem is that the film's version of a matriarchal society is just the current world with the genders swapped. Beer ads with scantily clad men. Women in boardrooms while men cook at home. Women cat-calling men on the street. One-for-one substitution. No actual imagination applied.

If you are going to make a film about what the world would look like if women held all the power, the least you can do is make it interesting. What would actually be different. What would stay the same. What does power do to people regardless of gender. Ladies First does not ask any of these questions. It just flips the existing world upside down and expects that to be enough.

The Cast

Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike are both good individually. Pike in particular is clearly having fun playing the sharp, ruthless, charming version of everything Damien used to be. The supporting cast is stacked. Charles Dance, Fiona Shaw, Kathryn Hunter, Richard E. Grant, Emily Mortimer. An extraordinary collection of British actors, most of whom are given almost nothing to do. Shaw gets one memorable scene. Grant is playing a homeless man covered in pigeons. That is what this film does with Richard E. Grant.

The One Joke Problem

The film has one joke. Men are now treated the way women used to be treated. It tells this joke over and over for 93 minutes. The first few times it lands. By the middle of the film it has run dry. By the end it has been replaced by a straightforward reformed-man romance that is more predictable than anything in the first half. The satire evaporates and what remains is a conventional Netflix comedy with an unusual setting.

For a film made in 2026, by a female director and a mostly female writing team, it is surprisingly toothless about what it actually has to say. The premise had the potential to be genuinely provocative. It settles for comfortable.

Average, and That Is Enough to Say

Ladies First is not a disaster. It is watchable. Some scenes work. Some jokes land. Pike is worth watching. But it is a film that had something to say and chose not to say it, and that is a specific kind of disappointment. The 26% on Rotten Tomatoes is a bit harsh. The 5.8 on IMDb is about right.