Ladies First

In the gender war comedy’s heyday of the 1980s, Dolly Parton famously got to humiliate a chauvinist company director in 9 to 5, while Melanie Griffith was the original girlboss in Working Girl. If this genre were revived today, one would naturally assume the post-pandemic incarnation of misogyny, namely the rise of the manosphere, would be applied. But Netflix film Ladies First decides to forgo pertinent social commentary and instead rehash the tropes of those aforementioned films.

Sacha Baron Cohen plays slick ad exec and aspiring CEO of the Atlas corporation, Damien Sachs. He ticks every sexist cliché: liar, womaniser, master manipulator of women. But, as with those classic workplace gender comedies, he’s about to get a taste of his own medicine in the form of Alex Fox (Rosamund Pike), who is hired as creative director after execs realise the agency is woefully lacking in female representation.

Following an accident, Damien wakes up to a Groundhog Day-esque nightmare of a world run by women, with Alex his superior and erstwhile secretary Felicity (Fiona Shaw) the new CEO. This makes way for plenty of cheeky banter and entertaining gender role reversals. He’s subjected to demeaning treatment by female paramedics who ask if he’s on the pill before they can treat him; he’s catcalled by a cabbie; scantily clad men adorn advertisements and magazines. He even – shock horror – has a cat, which leads to him being dubbed “a childless cat man”. Damien being reduced to an overly emotional man in an ad meeting, and undergoing a sexy makeover to wow his female bosses, are particularly amusing moments.

There’s something uncanny about seeing Cohen sans his absurd alter ego disguises. While he never quite appears at home in a mainstream romcom role, Pike is a gem as always. She injects Alex with a level of gusto that makes one long for a more substantial flick. There are cameos aplenty from the crème de la crème of British talent, including the always excellent Richard E Grant as a male version of Home Alone‘s pigeon lady, Emily Mortimer as Damien’s sister and wing-woman of sorts, and Charles Dance as Atlas’s dethroned CEO.

But for all its humorous inversions, the premise wears thin quickly, giving way to a more traditional romcom. Ladies First is at its best when it dares to be subversive rather than formulaic, ultimately feeling like a missed opportunity.