Ladies First Review: Great Cast, Dated Concept

There’s a version of Ladies First that feels urgent and razor-sharp. The cast is there. The director is there. Even the premise — a swaggering male chauvinist gets knocked out cold and wakes up in a world where women hold all the power — has genuine comic potential. What’s missing, unfortunately, is the element of surprise.

Netflix’s new comedy, directed by Thea Sharrock (Wicked Little Letters, Me Before You), is a remake of Éléonore Pourriat’s 2018 French romcom I Am Not an Easy Man — the first French-language film ever commissioned by the streamer. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Damien Sachs, a lothario and advertising executive who, as narrator Richard E. Grant’s Pigeon Man cheerfully informs us upfront, is simply “an asshole.” He struts through the office to the strains of “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” treats his brilliant colleague Alex (Rosamund Pike) as little more than a diversity checkbox, and fully expects to be handed the CEO role when his mentor Fred (Charles Dance) retires.

Then he runs face-first into a lamp post chasing Alex down the street, and wakes up somewhere else entirely.

The Flip Side

In Damien’s new reality, the agency’s former receptionist Felicity (Fiona Shaw) is CEO, the cleaning woman Glenda (Kathryn Hunter) owns the entire company, and Alex is on the fast track to the top job. Men are told to relax and not get too emotional in meetings. They order green salads while the women devour steaks. Charles Dance — after seasons of wielding medieval authority on Game of Thrones — sheepishly delivers coffee while Alex calls him her “cashmere angel.” It is, to be fair, a delight.

Shaw and Hunter in particular seem to be having the absolute time of their lives. One of the film’s best scenes has Shaw’s Felicity, draped in a terrycloth robe, summoning Damien to her corporate penthouse for a bit of very pointed quid pro quo. The gender reversal lands hardest in these supporting moments, when the film trusts its ensemble to do the heavy lifting.

The world-building gags come fast — Victor’s Secret, Burger Queen, Harriet Potter, Donna Quixote, a female Pope Beatrice — and while they get a knowing chuckle the first few times, they start to feel like a checklist. A female-sung rendition of Radiohead’s “Creep” plays at one point, and the on-the-nose quality is hard to ignore. The screenplay, credited to Natalie Krinsky (The Broken Hearts Gallery), Cinco Paul, and Katie Silberman (Booksmart), throws every reversed sexist stereotype it can find at the screen with admirable commitment. Some of them stick. A lot of them you’ve already seen coming.

Cohen and Pike Make It Work — Mostly

What keeps Ladies First watchable, even when the plot mechanics are grinding predictably forward, is the chemistry between its two leads. This is a notably different mode for Cohen — no disguise, no alter ego, no accent. Just a man playing a recognizable type of awful person and being asked to feel genuinely humiliated. He leans into it with real commitment, grounding the comedy in something that feels lived-in rather than performed.

And then there’s Pike. Director Sharrock didn’t hesitate when asked about the moment she knew her leads would click. “Our first meeting was, of course, on Zoom,” Sharrock told How-To Geek. “She was in Prague, I think at the time. Sacha and I were both in London. I could tell from the minute she pinned him down on what was his favorite part in the script, what did he think the most important moment was between the two of them, and the way he responded to her questions — I knew this was going to be a winning couple.”

“The hidden secret really is she’s absolutely hilarious,” Sharrock added. “She has the best sense of humor. She’s like really quite naughty with her sense of humor, and I think she absolutely loved being in a comedy.”

Pike is genuinely funny here — assured and sharp in a way that makes you wish the material pushed her further. There’s a metatextual pleasure in watching her, the calculating Amy Dunne of Gone Girl, go to work on Cohen, the man who gave the world the gleefully chauvinistic Borat. But the film keeps Alex a little too polished, a little too regal, even in Damien’s original world. The contrast might have hit harder if she’d been allowed to be more flawed or unglamorous in act one.

A Satire That’s Playing Catch-Up

The deeper issue with Ladies First is timing — not comedic timing, which is mostly fine, but cultural timing. The film’s script was built on the assumption that a female CEO is still a radical, almost unthinkable sight. In 1994, when Barry Levinson’s Disclosure was exploring similar workplace power dynamics, that framing made more sense. In 2026, it lands differently. Female titans of industry exist. They run studios, banks, countries. The satirical inversion the film is banking on doesn’t carry the same jolt it once might have.

A sharper version of this story might have started with a Damien who already knows, intellectually, that his attitudes are wrong — and still can’t shake them. That would be the more interesting, and more honest, version of this particular male journey in 2026. Instead, we get a man who is genuinely shocked to discover that women are capable of running things, and we wait patiently for him to catch up.

Sharrock, for her part, was clear-eyed about the challenge of making comedy land. “It’s the hardest to get right,” she said. “It’s not easy to make lots of people laugh. Everybody’s humor is different. It’s all about timing and delivery, and the minute you’re slightly off, it just doesn’t work.” She also noted that Cohen was insistent on grounding everything in reality. “He particularly has to really feel everything that he’s going through as if it’s really happening, not in a slightly overblown comedic fashion, at which point it loses some of its value. He was a great guide for us on that.”

That approach pays off in the smaller, more human moments. When Damien and Alex end up in bed together and immediately start wrestling over who gets to be on top, it’s genuinely funny precisely because both actors play it completely straight. And when Alex, now his boss, shows zero interest in anything resembling a relationship the morning after, the reversal has actual sting.

The film moves at a clip — it’s 90 minutes and doesn’t waste much of them — and the sheer volume of gags means enough land to keep things pleasant. This is not a bad film. It’s a likable one, carried by an almost ridiculously overqualified British ensemble doing their polished best with material that asks less of them than they’re capable of giving.

By the time Damien has seen the error of his ways — which you’ll clock coming from approximately the second scene — Ladies First has delivered exactly what it promised and nothing more. Sometimes that’s enough. Whether it’s enough for you probably depends on how much you’ve missed a breezy, star-powered battle-of-the-sexes comedy, and how willing you are to forgive a satire for being gentler than the moment it’s wading into.

Ladies First is now streaming on Netflix.