This is the rough part. If you had asked me at the beginning of the year if I’d be disliking a film with Sacha Baron Cohen, Rosamund Pike, Charles Dance, Richard E Grant, Emily Mortimer, and Fiona Shaw, I would have probably thought no way in hell. Worst case scenario, that gang tried to make an Oscar bait film that the pacing is a bit rough in, and moves at a glacial pace. But to see them in a comedy, a high concept comedy based on a French Netflix title, we are living in some weird reality. I don’t know whose fault this is, but it is a series of systematic failures that led to Ladies First being where it is. And no, it has nothing to do with me being a guy.

This film just truly isn’t sure why it would work in the first place. The premise is pretty simple, though butchered. Cohen plays Damien, who is near the top of an advertising agency that is heavy on male dominance, and apparently lacks an HR department in 2026. When the higher ups learn they have an opportunity to land a major client, but that client wants a female perspective in the room, Damien promotes a random female employee (Pike), who believes she earned it on merit. After all, she’s been doing this work forever, and deserves to be promoted. She was chosen because her name is Alex, and she was alphabetically first. After a heated exchange with Alex, where she quits after realizing she’s been manipulated, Damien walks into a solid object and knocks himself out. Then, our ladies man, full of toxic male energy, wakes up in a world where anything a man was doing is now being done by a woman. It is a winning premise, and a smarter writer/director would have milked more from it, but this is just so unfunny. It is also just stupid.

It thinks it has flipped the coin, and showed Damien what it’s like to walk a mile in heels, but he starts off in the same position he had promoted himself to. This isn’t How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, where Damien has to climb a corporate ladder not meant for him, and endure decades of sexual harassment. Alex, also has a child in the real world. She actually retains that child in the flipped world, while Damien doesn’t get to experience being a single parent, just like Alex, and the expectations we put on women.

When I say this film has absolutely nothing to say, I mean it. It truly seems to have missed the entire point or purpose. For example, the film has very little time, or chooses to give little time to Damien and the company setup.So, everything is very surface level. Damien is a scoundrel, we are led to believe, because of one scene where he tells the woman he just slept with in the morning how lovely it was, he didn’t know what she wanted for breakfast so he ordered one of everything, and not only is her dress from the previous night hanging up, but he bought her a new outfit in case she didn’t want to wear the same clothes as yesterday. The joke? “Anything for the woman who took my virginity.” As if anyone face value would believe him. The rest of his encounters with women are smooth in the way a powerful man thinks he can get away with anything. His secretary is keeping a list of times he’s done something, in case she’s ever fired. But, no one does anything. It’s a male cum culture, but aside from five seconds with other men, even the bro culture is stunted. He lacks a best friend to bounce his conquests off of, someone who also flips in the alternate universe.

It’s like this is on speed run. Gotta get Damien back to the real world. The crux is that Damien needs to be named CEO in order to go back to his timeline, and toward the peak of the film, he develops a genuine bond with this version of Alex, and the two sleep together, because, I suppose, in the other world it would be inevitable that the single Alex would sleep with Damien? After all, he’s just so irresistible. You know, from all of those scenes… we established.

I was thinking about these similar “what if” movies, and I thought about how well Nicolas Cage’s The Family Man works compared to this. He’s established in his wealthy existence, we see his impressive life, but there’s a melancholy tone to what could have been. Then, he wakes up in this alternate life, experiencing something completely different as if his other life never happened, and while he’s chasing his previous success, he also slowly comes to realize the charm of being a father to some wonderful kids, and getting to marry the girl of his dreams.

I do not know what lesson Damien learns here, because it is all either for a gag, or poorly explained. The joke is either easy, or not done at all. He doesn’t flip through history to find out all life’s greatest male achievements were made by women. He doesn’t flip on a TV to see that women’s sports are far more popular than mens’ sports. he doesn’t see men being expected broadly to stay at home and raise kids. There’s a passing joke at Mother, Daughter, and the Holy Spirit, but that’s about as wide reaching as they are willing to go. His father is more submissive, but it’s hard to tell, since we didn’t really bother with his father much beforehand, or his mother, or his sister. It’s hard to understand the alternate versions of things we never bothered to talk about, and we’re just supposed to accept the new version must be different.

And honestly, Cohen is checked out here. The scene where he realizes he’s achieved what he needs to to go back, lacks so much energy. He seems almost fake when he starts feigning sadness over returning to his actual life. Then, eh runs around trying to make amends for something that didn’t happen, including a major apology to Alex. But, does he expect that because the other version had sex with him, the real version will too?

Some of the jokes are just baffling. Why are the girls doing jalepeno shots? What a weird culture shift. Like, if women ruled the world, they would reinvent shots?These mirror experience, alternate reality films are tough, but when done right, they absolutely hit all the right buttons. When they don’t, I suppose they become Ladies First. The audio description here is International Digital Center, narrated by Emily Eden, and the AD is fine, though there’s a car crash segment that I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. Otherwise, the only other strong choice they make is to keep using they/them pronouns for Alex’s kid, who is on screen for maybe two minutes, and offers nothing meaningful to their own character, or really the film in general anyway. Perhaps the kid looked androgynous so they just chose neutral pronouns. And, by the way, in a flipped world, what is that like for the non-binary? Is it better or worse? It seems like it would be the same, because women pick up the bad habits of men, so they’d probably be just as toxic.

I really wanted to like this. I clicked on this Netflix film with that aspirational “please God” thing. I don’t even care if I’m the only one who does like a film, but I just kept scratching my head at all of the choices being made, wondering what motivated them to take the weakest, least interesting, underdeveloped, unfunny, option every single time. I’ve had a few films I can say were worse in 2026, so this is not the worst film of the year, but it is coming awfully close to the bottom of the barrel.

Ladies First fails miserably to crack even the ceiling of mediocrity, instead opting for a comedy last approach. The bigger crime is the concept and talent are totally wasted for a film that has nothing to say.

Rotten: 2.9/10