{"id":597678,"date":"2026-05-22T08:41:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T08:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/597678\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T08:41:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T08:41:09","slug":"ladies-first-review-sacha-baron-cohen-and-rosamund-pike-come-last-in-one-joke-netflix-comedy-sacha-baron-cohen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/597678\/","title":{"rendered":"Ladies First review \u2013 Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike come last in one-joke Netflix comedy | Sacha Baron Cohen"},"content":{"rendered":"

In its attempt to become a one-stop shop for just about every form of nostalgia possible, Netflix<\/a> has now decided to revive the dreadful British comedy of the 2000s. Films such as Sex Lives of the Potato Men, Three and Out, Fat Slags and Lesbian Vampire Killers saw creatives boldly stand up to Hollywood and declare that whatever they could do, the UK film industry could do it 10 times worse.<\/p>\n

The all-deciding algorithm has somehow deemed it necessary for a return to that cursed era with the release of Ladies First, a broad and chintzy new comedy that would have felt old hat even back then. It\u2019s an excruciatingly unfunny high-concept thought experiment, imagining a world with flipped gender politics, that\u2019s far too happy with itself and what it\u2019s allegedly achieving to be passed off as just some charming throwback. Like the other misfires it recalls, it\u2019s also a criminal waste of talent, a murderer\u2019s row of actors who hopefully got paid handsomely for the embarrassment of this whiffing up their IMDb pages.<\/p>\n

Chief among them is Rosamund Pike, an actor who gave one of the most scarily indelible performances of the 2010s in David Fincher\u2019s Gone Girl, deserving of far, far better than this. She\u2019s at least well-cast, something that can\u2019t be said for her co-star Sacha Baron Cohen<\/a>, a jarringly odd fit as Damien Sachs, a suave but sexist man about town who learns the error of his ways (for all of his many, many faults, Mel Gibson was perfectly cast as the similar lead of this film\u2019s infinitely superior forefather What Women Want). He doesn\u2019t have the initial swagger or then the softening charm, a flat, confused and deeply uncomfortable performance bringing a bad film down even further.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s magical conceit sees Damien bump his head and wake up in a world reversed, women now on top and men struggling to keep up. Paul Smith is now Pauline, Harry Potter now Harriet, bras are for balls, Five Guys is Five Gals and Damien is now a sexually harassed and entirely underestimated smaller cog at the advertising agency where he was once a top dog. Pike\u2019s put upon single mother Alex has also gone from patronised to powerful as she swans her way to the very top of the corporate ladder (Pike is wasted but at least convincing as a ruthless exec). With help from Richard E Grant\u2019s magical pigeon-strewn hobo, some humility and a penile implant, Damien has to take her on without the system on his side.<\/p>\n

It sits alongside other fantastical \u201cwhat if?\u201d comedies such as the Amy Schumer vehicle I Feel Pretty<\/a>, last year\u2019s Good Fortune<\/a> and the intermittently funny rom-com spoof Isn\u2019t It Romantic<\/a>, a film that shares a co-writer with Ladies First, Katie Silberman of Don\u2019t Worry Darling. Too often these comic fantasies are ideas that might sound snappy in a pitch meeting but collapse when awkwardly dragged onto the screen with a one-joke premise stretched beyond its limits and inconsistent world-building that feels scrappy at best. Even at a barely there 84-minute length, Ladies First is the very worst example of this in recent memory, taking an undeniable real world issue (women are still undervalued and underpaid in the workplace<\/a>) and hammering home the same point ad nauseam without anything smart or sharp to add. Sexism is real and misogyny persists but by painting such a cartoonishly broad-strokes picture of both the sexes and the office (the workplace intrigue feels ripped from an 80s kids movie), it becomes a smugly repetitive and utterly useless waste of everyone\u2019s time. With every pained joke (what if people said fatherfucker instead of motherfucker, what if it was drama king instead of drama queen etc), you can almost feel the film\u2019s three writers and Wicked Little Letters<\/a> director Thea Sharrock proudly looking over to see if we\u2019re laughing, ready to explain the film\u2019s very basic idea of humour if we\u2019re not. The script is more intent on clumsily pointing things out (yes straight men do that, you\u2019re right) than actually having anything funny to say about it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a remake of a French comedy (red flag) also owned by Netflix which feels about as inventive a justification for being as the streamer also launching Love is Blind in a different country, reusing IP just because. For some masochists, there might be some bizarro appeal to watching, say, Kathryn Hunter<\/a> drunkenly doing the splits for a jeering nightclub audience or Emily Mortimer farting up a storm or Fiona Shaw orgasming to death while Baron Cohen dances in assless chaps, promising to pump her \u201cfull of lead\u201d but for a film so unashamedly silly, it\u2019s also incredibly, tiresomely un-fun and, by the end, laughably earnest, as if we should all be learning a very important lesson. I did learn a lesson here, but it was less about male chauvinism (bad, in case you didn\u2019t know) and more about the heinous state of comedy films in 2026. No wonder everyone\u2019s so nostalgic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In its attempt to become a one-stop shop for just about every form of nostalgia possible, Netflix has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-597678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}