The advertising industry has long served as a convenient shorthand in popular culture for a certain kind of male arrogance — the swagger, the martinis, the assumption that the corner office was a birthright. Now Netflix has delivered a film that takes this archetype and, quite literally, hits him over the head with it.
"Ladies First," directed by Thea Sharrock and starring Sacha Baron Cohen as a boorish agency executive named Damien, borrows its premise from a 2018 French film and its sensibility from somewhere around 2005. Mr. Cohen plays against type — or at least against his usual method of physical and vocal transformation — as a man who wakes from a head injury to find himself in a world where women run everything and men are told not to get "too emotional" in meetings.
The satire, such as it is, proceeds exactly as you might expect. Female construction workers ogle him on the street. He orders salad instead of steak. Book titles read "Harriet Potter" and "Donna Quixote." (There is also a female Pope, named Beatrice, in case the point remained unclear.)
Rosamund Pike appears as Alex, a fellow executive whom Damien treats dismissively before the accident and who becomes his dominant boss afterward. The supporting cast — Charles Dance, Fiona Shaw, Emily Mortimer, Richard E. Grant with pigeons on his head — is almost absurdly distinguished for the material at hand.
The screenwriters, Natalie Krinsky, Cinco Paul and Katie Silberman, have reversed every available cliché with the thoroughness of people working through a checklist. A "testicle bra" figures into the proceedings. The waxing scene arrives on schedule.
Some of it lands, in the way that any joke repeated with sufficient frequency will eventually catch you off guard. But the film's central problem is not execution. It is that the satirical conceit already felt dated before Mr. Cohen's character hit that pole.
No one will be surprised to learn that Damien sees the error of his ways by the final credits. The real surprise, perhaps, is that anyone thought the lesson still needed teaching quite this literally.
Original story published in The Hollywood Reporter: "'Ladies First' Review: Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike in a Netflix Comedy That's High-Concept but Hopelessly Predictable"