Ladies First Review: Funny Cast, Familiar Premise

There’s a version of Ladies First that could have been a sharp, timely comedy. It has the cast for it. It has the premise. It even has the right director in Thea Sharrock, who brought real warmth and wit to Wicked Little Letters. But somewhere between the concept and the execution, Netflix’s new gender-swap comedy settles for knowing chuckles over genuine laughs — and for a film this stacked with talent, that’s a little frustrating.

The film is a remake of Éléonore Pourriat’s 2018 French romcom I Am Not an Easy Man — notably the first French-language film Netflix ever commissioned — and it follows Damien Sachs (Sacha Baron Cohen), a swaggering, misogynistic advertising executive who is quite literally knocked into a new reality when he runs face-first into a pole chasing down his colleague Alex (Rosamund Pike) after she quits. He wakes up in a world where women hold all the power: his company’s former receptionist Felicity (Fiona Shaw) is now CEO, the janitor Glenda (Kathryn Hunter) owns the whole operation, and Alex is the one being groomed for the top job. His old boss Fred (Charles Dance) sheepishly delivers coffee and gets called “cashmere angel.” At home, his mother watches TV while his father slaves in the kitchen. His dentist sister cracks fart jokes.

You get the idea. The film moves quickly, the gags arrive at a consistent clip, and inevitably some of them land. Female construction workers ogle Damien on the street. He attempts to become “fuckable” for career advancement, submitting to a full body wax in a sequence that plays like a direct callback to The 40-Year-Old Virgin. He orders a plain salad at a business dinner while Shaw and Pike demolish steaks and highballs across the table. When he and Alex finally end up in bed together, they literally wrestle over who gets to be on top. The gender-swapped brand gags — Victor’s Secret, Burger Queen, Harriet Potter, Donna Quixote — come thick and fast, though critics have noted they start to feel belabored pretty quickly. A female-sung cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” lands in the too-on-the-nose category, and Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” opening the film is the kind of soundtrack choice that announces its own joke before the joke has a chance to breathe.

An Almost Ridiculously Overqualified Cast

What saves Ladies First from being a total shrug is the people in it. Cohen, unusually, isn’t hiding behind a disguise or an accent here — Damien is played relatively straight, and he leans into the character’s humiliations with genuine commitment. The film works best when it’s letting him feel things, which is very much by design. Sharrock says she and Cohen were aligned from the start on grounding the comedy in reality rather than playing it broad.

“Sacha was very big on this — the king of comedy that he is — ground it in reality,” Sharrock told How-To Geek. “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.”

Pike, meanwhile, is a genuine revelation in the comedy space. Sharrock knew it from the moment the three of them were on a Zoom call together — Pike in Prague, Cohen and Sharrock in London — and Pike started pinning Cohen down on what he thought the most important moment between their characters was. “I could tell from the minute she pinned him down on what was his favorite part in the script… and the way he responded to her questions that I knew this was going to be a winning couple,” Sharrock said.

“She’s amazing. The hidden secret really is she’s absolutely hilarious. 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,” Sharrock added.

Pike herself has talked openly about how much fun she had flipping the script — literally. “I’ve never tried to just absorb all of the misogynistic qualities that we see in men around us all the time. That was fun!” she told Out. “You realize you can do it because you’ve been exposed to it for so many years. Objectifying my costars… I found it very fun.”

Shaw and Hunter are, by multiple accounts, having the absolute time of their lives. Watching Dance — who spent years as the most imperious man in any room on Game of Thrones — meekly hand over a coffee while being called “cashmere angel” is exactly the kind of casting joke that makes a movie like this worth watching even when the script isn’t fully delivering.

Where the Satire Falls Short

The problem isn’t that Ladies First is bad. It’s that it’s comfortable. The script, co-written by Natalie Krinsky (The Broken Hearts Gallery), Cinco Paul, and Katie Silberman (Booksmart), reverses every sexist stereotype it can find with obvious, cheerful efficiency — but doesn’t push past the reversal into anything that actually stings or surprises. The film’s largely female creative team, despite the talent involved, delivers insights about gender that feel more at home in a mid-2000s romcom than a 2026 Netflix release.

The comparison that keeps coming up in reviews is What Women Want, Mel Gibson’s 2000 gender-swap comedy — which is not the kind of cultural touchstone you want your film measured against. Female CEOs are no longer a novelty. The idea of a woman running a company isn’t the radical inversion the film needs it to be, and the script doesn’t seem entirely sure what to do with that reality. Barry Levinson’s Disclosure wrestled with similar workplace power dynamics all the way back in 1994.

There’s also a metatextual angle that’s more interesting than anything the film explicitly does with it: the idea of Cohen’s most famous creation, the cheerfully chauvinistic Borat, being taken apart by Pike’s calculating Gone Girl energy. That’s a movie. Ladies First gestures at it but doesn’t quite commit.

Sharrock directed the whole thing with two versions of every character in mind — each actor essentially giving two separate performances, one for Damien’s “real” world and one for the flipped version. The conversations about hair, costume, posture, and status were communal, she says, because every actor needed to be doing it the same way. “Everybody had to speak to each other,” she explained. That attention to craft shows on screen, even when the material underneath it doesn’t always rise to meet the performances.

Ladies First is streaming on Netflix now. Whether it clicks for you will probably depend on how much you need your satire to have teeth — and how much you’re willing to just enjoy watching Rosamund Pike order a steak and not call anyone back.