'Ladies First' still only cares about the men
Netflix
When a young child does something unkind and you ask them how they’d feel if someone did that same thing to them, they say “sad” and learn. That’s about as deep as “Ladies First” gets too.
Adapted from the 2018 French film “I Am Not An Easy Man,” the movie purports to invert the patriarchy while only ever trying to be empathy for dummies — with those dummies being the old white guys whose selfish, sexist jackassery is what got us here in the first place. I mean, this is really the plot: Damien (Sacha Baron Cohen) is a high-ranking agency exec angling to become CEO while also objectifying women and rejecting anything resembling human emotion. One bonk to the head later and suddenly Damien discovers the world has flipped, where he’s powerless and underestimated and the women in his office, including Rosamund “My Oscar Nomination Should Have Prevented Me From Taking Roles Like This” Pike of “Gone Girl, cling tightly to the pole position. And, yes, there are attempted double entendres like that a lot.
That might be interesting if “Ladies First” — which shockingly is directed and co-written by women — embraced the idea and visualized how the world actually would be different with women in charge. Instead all we see is the women replicating what the men were doing to the women, which is not only shallow and obvious but really shows no interest in considering the women’s capabilities and depth at all. (It’s like the [quite funny] “SNL” Jon Bovi skit, settling for the idea of opposites and moving on.) The movie doesn’t take the concept anywhere other than a soft, consequence-free realization for Damien, who is impossible to root for in a totally charmless performance by Cohen.
Sure, there are a couple laughs here and there, mostly in the first act. Then things go from bad to worse until at only 84 minutes “Ladies First” (which also features depressing appearances by Emily Mortimer, Charles Dance and Richard E. Grant in a part better off not explained) just kinda shrugs and leaves, far from sincere or intelligent about the issue at hand and very much feeling like a relic long ago conceived to be the most controversial movie of 1981.
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