In its attempt to become a one-stop shop for just about every form of nostalgia possible, Netflix 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.
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’s an excruciatingly unfunny high-concept thought experiment, imagining a world with flipped gender politics, that’s far too happy with itself and what it’s allegedly achieving to be passed off as just some charming throwback. Like the other misfires it recalls, it’s also a criminal waste of talent, a murderer’s row of actors who hopefully got paid handsomely for the embarrassment of this whiffing up their IMDb pages.
Chief among them is Rosamund Pike, an actor who gave one of the most scarily indelible performances of the 2010s in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, deserving of far, far better than this. She’s at least well-cast, something that can’t be said for her co-star Sacha Baron Cohen, 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’s infinitely superior forefather What Women Want). He doesn’t have the initial swagger or then the softening charm, a flat, confused and deeply uncomfortable performance bringing a bad film down even further.
The film’s 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’s 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’s magical pigeon-strewn hobo, some humility and a penile implant, Damien has to take her on without the system on his side.
It sits alongside other fantastical “what if?” comedies such as the Amy Schumer vehicle I Feel Pretty, last year’s Good Fortune and the intermittently funny rom-com spoof Isn’t It Romantic, a film that shares a co-writer with Ladies First, Katie Silberman of Don’t 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) 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’s 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’s three writers and Wicked Little Letters director Thea Sharrock proudly looking over to see if we’re laughing, ready to explain the film’s very basic idea of humour if we’re not. The script is more intent on clumsily pointing things out (yes straight men do that, you’re right) than actually having anything funny to say about it.
It’s 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 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 “full of lead” but for a film so unashamedly silly, it’s 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’t know) and more about the heinous state of comedy films in 2026. No wonder everyone’s so nostalgic.
Ladies First is out now on Netflix
