Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | May 25, 2026
There is exactly one good joke in the entirety of Netflix’s new Sacha Baron Cohen comedy, Ladies First. The film is about a wildly misogynistic marketing exec — up for CEO of his ad company — who promoted a random woman, Alex Fox (Rosamund Pike), into a position of power for the optics of it, only to completely ignore and talk over her. Frustrated, Alex quits her job, and while Cohen’s character, Damien, is berating her in the street, he hits his head on a light post and wakes up in an alternate world where women have all the power.
In this fantasy world, men are the “inferior” sex, Alex holds the role that Damien occupied in the real world, and Damien must figure out how to land the CEO position as a man in a world controlled by women in order to escape. The men do the cooking, file frivolous sexual harassment lawsuits, spend hours in the gym and on their makeup, submit to regular waxing, and drop thousands on their wardrobes — all to find the fine line between looking attractive enough to be taken seriously and not so attractive that their bosses hit on them.
It is as reductive and harebrained as one might imagine, and somehow manages to diminish the role of women in the working world even while trying to parody the ease with which men glide through it. It’s a real feat. Because the men in this alternative world, see, are only good for cooking, cleaning, sleeping their way to the top, and brushing their daughters’ hair — which is an odd way to characterize women in a movie seemingly designed to reveal how difficult it is for women to advance.
But there is one joke that lands (at least for me). Damien and Alex are driving toward the estate of the woman who will choose the next CEO, improbably bonding, when Damien says that he’s the “best man” for the job, and that if the board had any “balls,” they’d choose him.
“Had any balls?” Alex asks, in an alternative world where this is not a common saying. “What do you suppose it means?”
“It means to be a man,” Damien says. “To have balls, to be powerful, to be strong.”
“Balls?” Alex wonders. “The delicate sacks that dangle from your body where the slightest tap sends you weeping to the ground?”
And that’s easily the funniest — and, honestly, the most sophisticated — joke in the entire film. Why do we equate manhood with testicles?
Beyond that, there’s not much to offer here. There’s a predictable but barely fleshed-out rom-com subplot between Damien and Alex that’s supposed to (?) suggest that Damien catches feelings for his boss once he gets in touch with his feminine (but masculine?) side. But the chemistry between Rosamund Pike and Sacha Baron Cohen is about what you might expect from the chemistry between Rosamund Pike and Sacha Baron Cohen, which is to say that Pike almost contains her disgust. Briefly. The film traffics almost exclusively in stereotypes, which makes sense, because that’s literally all it has.
Mostly, though, it feels like a movie made for Netflix. Not a movie that was made and happens to stream on Netflix, but rather one designed for nothing more than to kill 90 minutes. It’s a brain smoother. It’s completely useless except to suck the minutes away from your life on a rainy day when your time would be better served literally watching raindrops pool into a puddle.
