Critic Reviews

Ladies First invites pointed as well as pungent jokes, and the opportunities are fully exploited, sometimes with enormous wit.

Thea Sharrock’s film effectively skewers institutionalized misogyny and sexist comedy movie tropes, but the message was clearer and more powerful in the original short, which was allowed to be disturbing without also having to be funny.

The easy feminism of winks and role reversals quickly wears thin.

Maybe back in the ‘80s this premise would have seemed fresh; at this point, it’s practically reactionary.

Pike and Shaw throw themselves at this even if Mortimer has almost nothing to play, even if Cohen’s funny moments are few and far between, straining for humor in a movie that probably came along five years too late to deliver.

Rather than stirring a debate, or even inspiring deeper cultural introspection, Sharrock and her collaborators deliver a trifle. For a satire about progress, “Ladies First” relies on far too many ideas from the past — cinematic even more than cultural.

The film moves swiftly enough, with the gags coming at such a consistent pace, that inevitably some of them land. And the performers certainly know how to sell the material, with Cohen amusingly leaning into his character’s humiliations, Pike appealingly reveling in her character’s dominance, and the top-notch supporting cast going through their paces like the pros they are.

Netflix's new movie is no shoddy disaster – it's a competently, if unexceptionally, mounted production by director Thea Sharrock, featuring an impressive British and Irish cast. It's not entirely without laughs, either. But this story of a chauvinist who bumps his head and wakes up in a world where women are in charge is so fundamentally misguided that I at times could not believe I was actually watching it. A comedy sketch premise stretched to feature length, the team behind Ladies First should have spent a little less time on thinking up gender-flipped jokes and more time wondering whether they actually had a coherent story worth telling.

From the sigh-inducing jokes to the rom-com blueprint “Ladies First” never strays from, the film keeps threatening to become stranger and more interesting than it is.

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.