‘Ladies First’ Review: Netflix Remakes Their Own Regressive Film Into an Even More Dated Comedy
While Ladies First boasts a fun cast, the movie’s morals are even more dated and regressive than its French-language 2018 original.
Netflix has entered a new era of creative bankruptcy. They’re now remaking their own movies for an English-language audience. Movies that no one saw, which the streamer hopes will point viewers toward their original counterparts. This might have been respectable if the film Thea Sharrock’s Ladies First was based on was any good, but Éléonore Pourriat’s I Am Not an Easy Man (Je ne suis pas un homme facile) is a regressive and dated comedy that posits interesting ideas and accomplishes nothing noteworthy with them.
The conceit itself is compelling enough for the filmmakers to make the audience think of the patriarchal-dominated society that has defined our systems since the dawn of time, but both Pourriat and Sharrock do nothing with their premise and prefer to perpetuate tropes that might have been transgressive in the 1960s but feel too little too late in the year of our lord 2026. It thinks it’s saying something by making a misogynist asshole (played by Sacha Baron Cohen) realize the error of his sexist behavior, but it actually accomplishes nothing of interest at all.
Baron Cohen’s Damian Sachs works for a high-level advertising company, which, along with CEO Fred Powell (Charles Dance), has benefited their own pockets and prevents women in their own company from moving forward, including Alex Fox (Rosamund Pike), who has been a part of their agency for over twenty years. For optics, Damian promotes Alex to a higher position, but plans to do nothing with her and keep their operations as is. That is, until Alex quits and Damian hits himself in the head after failing to chase her in the hopes she will get her job back.
When Damian wakes up, he’s suddenly been transported to a world where women rule, and Alex has taken over his position at the company, now overseen by Felicity Chase (Fiona Shaw), their secretary in the male-dominated “real world.” Thinking he’s walked into purgatory, Damian will have to change his behavior before being “sent back,” or he risks being in this world forever, as the film’s narrator (played by Richard E. Grant) explains to him.
The thing is, it is no longer uncommon for women to hold positions of power, not just at the corporate level but also at the political level. These types of stories usually don’t say much about the setting they put the protagonist in, beyond “maybe I should respect women a bit more.” No, really, the buck doesn’t stop at “respecting women,” because Damian is as much of a terrible person by the end of the film as he is at the beginning. He might show feelings for Alex when all is said and done, but what about the rest of his behavior? Did he learn something by being a part of this warped reality?
We certainly don’t get that sense, because the bulk of Ladies First is spent on a wide array of vaudevillian slapstick setpieces. Some of them are funny, I won’t lie. One in particular results in the year’s best punchline, and it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to spoil it for you. What I can say is that Baron Cohen and Shaw were clearly having tons of fun filming a scene that could’ve absolutely yielded a succession of bad taste events, but culminates at the perfect, pivotal comedic turn to set up the rest of the film.
Hilarious scenes, however, are sparse in this film, which prefers to prioritize a succession of inappropriate behaviors rather than comedy with an actual point of view. You can say what you want about I Am Not an Easy Man, but the chauvinist protagonist at the heart of the picture actually learned something, while Damian essentially remains the same character as Ladies First. Sharrock and co-screenwriters Natalie Kinsky, Cinco Paul, and Katie Silberman change a number of aspects from the original film that make their reinterpretation a bit more engaging, but they’ve completely diluted the basis of Pourriat’s picture by doing so.
It seems like a miracle that Sharrock has a star-studded ensemble that wants to play and have fun, and they’re the only reason why the movie isn’t as bad as it is. Its weaknesses stick out like a sore thumb, and its insistence on perpetuating stereotypes that should no longer exist in our society is problematic in and of itself, but one can’t fault the cast for at least trying to infuse some fun in this dreary affair. Baron Cohen’s brand of comedy is growing tiresome, but he can add a bit of texture to this relatively one-note character, making his journey semi-palpable.
Pike, on the other hand, will be able to brush off this role from her resumé, because she seems to actively care about the person she’s portraying and ensures Alex is able to reclaim her own agency, whether in the film’s real or fantasized worlds. She’s the primary reason why Ladies First is slightly better than its original film, even if the remake’s politics are surprisingly less transgressive than the French film.
That’s the most baffling aspect of Ladies First. We’re in 2026. Sexist stereotypes should be a thing of the past. The fact that Sharrock seems fine with telling such a story that feels as dated as when Richard Quine released How to Murder Your Wife in 1965 boggles the mind. Comedies like these shouldn’t exist in our current era. Yes, it’s grown more conservative and is regressing as we speak, but the movies shouldn’t follow suit, or else we’re bound to create a brain-dead, illiterate culture. Some will argue it already is, but can we not make the problem worse? Asking for a friend…