Nancy Meyers’ What Women Want, from 2000, was a romantic comedy about a male chauvinist advertising executive (Mel Gibson) who gets passed over for a promotion in favor of a female colleague (Helen Hunt). He then undergoes a metaphysical intervention (suddenly gains the ability to read women’s minds), which encourages him to see the error of his ways, be a little bit less sexist, and ultimately fall for that colleague.
Now, over a quarter-century later, we have director Thea Sharrock’s Ladies First, a Netflix movie with an almost identical setup: its male protagonist (Sacha Baron Cohen) is an ad executive, he’s up for a promotion against a female coworker (Rosamund Pike), and the metaphysical intervention is that Baron Cohen walks into a lamppost, and wakes up in an alternate universe in which women rule the world and men are their social inferiors. There’s a similar romantic turn, and also a similar lesson.
But while What Women Want, for the most part, worked, Ladies First is nearly a complete failure. What Women Want had fantastic chemistry between the leads, while putting Mel Gibson in that role was counterintuitive enough to work. Ladies First doesn’t allow Sacha Baron Cohen to do any of the things he’s good at. As for Rosamund Pike, she starred in Gone Girl, one of the great Gender Wars movies in history, but Ladies First gives her almost no real character to play. Also, Richard E. Grant’s talents are wasted as a guardian angel character in the tradition of Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life, the only character who’s in on what’s happening.
While Meyers’ film had a great look, with its advertising office that was a memorably beautiful set, Ladies First is bland. It also doesn’t do nearly enough with its overarching premise; the Pope being a woman named “Beatrice” is as far as it goes when it comes to world-building. The biggest issue is that, while Ladies First is a remake of the 2018 French comedy I Am Not an Easy Man, it’s more like it was made from a script that had been sitting in a drawer for 20 or 25 years. Even the idea of Hollywood remaking a French comedy was much more common in the 1980s and 90s than today.
It’s a world where women rule the office, Weinstein-style sexual harassment and casting-couch stuff by older female bosses is the norm, and the catcalling construction workers are ladies. In this world, men are sensitive, while women suddenly favor frat office banter. There was an odd movie in the 1990s called White Man’s Burden, with John Travolta and Harry Belafonte, that reversed race relations, giving Black people all the power. Like that film, Ladies First bit off more than it could chew.
A bigger problem is that Ladies First doesn’t fit in the present. The film’s set in a universe in which there was no #MeToo reckoning or “Great Awokening.” It’s a problem since the story takes place in the advertising world, or a version of it in which 1990s-style sexist beer commercials are still the norm, and we didn’t get the last two decades of Nike ads about how female athletes are brave and powerful.
This film seems like it’s set amidst the gender discourse of 2002, rather than 2026, the use of the phrase “childless cat man” notwithstanding.