Directed by Thea Sharrock — Screenplay by Natalie Krinsky, Cinco Paul, and Katie Silberman.
Thea Sharrock’s Ladies First is an English-language remake of Netflix’s 2018 French romantic-comedy Je ne suis pas un homme facile (international title: I Am Not An Easy Man) from director Éléonore Pourriat. The film follows Damien Sachs (played by Sacha Baron Cohen), a chauvinist high-ranking executive at an advertising agency, who gets recently promoted creative director Alex Fox (played by Rosamund Pike) to quit her job. She decides to leave when it becomes clear to her that he doesn’t care at all what she thinks and only promoted her for show. As Damien follows her out of their place of employment, he knocks himself out. He then wakes up in a world where positions of power have shifted into some kind of matriarchal society. To get back to his own world, Damien is told that he must rise through the ranks at the advertising agency, all the while overcoming the workplace and societal discrimination that women endure in the patriarchal society from which he originates.
I found this ‘What Women Want meets A Christmas Carol’ type of film to be quite a chore to sit through. On paper, it’s got a genuinely great cast with Rosamund Pike, Fiona Shaw, Charles Dance, Richard E. Grant, Kathryn Hunter, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Emily Mortimer, and yet it is a completely disposable dud of a comedy. The well-intended message of the film is important, as there are still glass ceilings that need to be shattered to ensure true gender equality. But what exactly the film itself says here isn’t novel, and it gets its obvious point across long before the thirty-minute mark, leaving you with a nails-on-chalkboard narrative that hits you over the head with preposterous ‘flipped’ situations done so lazily. It really is like you’re watching a film based on an extremely dated script that, in addition to having several stale elements, didn’t take into account how a matriarchal society is not just the mirror version of a misogynistic patriarchal one.
Of course, it solely being about showing what women go through every day is a valid focal point, and it doesn’t necessarily need to show what a matriarchal society would be like to be an effective film. But it should have something on its mind that is even a little bit insightful, if it wants to stand out for any good reason, and it doesn’t. Its specific focal point does not excuse the lazy writing and comedy on display. Showing Cohen’s sexist character going through hardship works for the film, but the comedy surrounding it does not. Rather, the comedy feels like lazy ’90s or early ’00s sitcom-level gender stereotype jokes over and over again, with very little of it ever being chuckleworthy. I’m not sure it got a deep laugh out of me even once. Eye-roll-inducing jokes dominate the picture. Is there some fun in seeing a misogynist being put through this kind of world reversal? Sure, but it runs out of steam and ideas so early on because it’s just an overinflated sketch. On top of that, all of the needle drops are the most on-the-nose music choices you could possibly think of.
So, on the whole, Thea Sharrock’s Ladies First is a frustratingly stale “comedy” that is a bit of a stain on the careers of the otherwise capable cast. You could argue that there is some fun to be had with Pike and Shaw hamming it up in certain scenes, but it’s not much. And, frankly, although Cohen is a comedy legend, he is miscast and not a good enough dramatic actor to sell the character arc, making his big apology sequence feel underbaked. So many of these actors are normally good, and the lead of the film is one of the most iconic funny men of the 2000s. Therefore, it makes it a big issue that Sharrock’s film struggles to get anything worthwhile out of its line-up of actors. The film also just flat-out fails as a comedy. When you add that to it feeling like a relic, and it not having anything new to say, then you’re left with a tough watch that is difficult to recommend.
2 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
