Damien Sachs (Sacha Baron Cohen) is a lead executive at advertising agency Atlas. He is also a world-class chauvinist. However, when he takes a bump to the head, he wakes to find himself in a parallel world led by a matriarchal society. 

When Damien discovers that his agency is losing customers due to their lack of female executives, he promotes Alex Fox (Rosamund Pike) to the team. Not because he has any idea of her skills, but because Alex was first on the alphabetical list. After she finds out she is merely a pawn in his efforts to get more female-centric advertising campaigns, she loudly resigns, and he chases her out of the building in an effort to fire her before she can quit. It is here he encounters a lamppost and the concrete floor that send him into his new reality. 

Here, women lead the way, men reside in the kitchen, play second fiddle, and have to constantly work on their physical appearance. In fact, every single gender swap joke you can think of, and many more that you probably cannot, are on show here. Oddly though, even these jokes seem outdated by today’s standards in an effort to really labour the point being made. 

The result is entirely unfunny, however. The comedy is at the level where it should have been a single sketch lasting less than five minutes, and the message, whilst valid, is plastered on so thickly that it loses all meaning. The fact that it feels like such a chore to find your way to the end of a ninety-minute movie really underlines how terrible everything on show is. 

On the whole, I am unsure who would find this interesting or funny. Feminists might find it offensive that the film suggests women would treat men exactly the same way that they have treated them in some form of petty revenge, whilst chauvinists are likely to just miss the laboured point because of the absurdity in which it is presented. The fact that the film is presented in such a pedestrian manner, to the point that the old-fashioned jokes match the presentation, would likely leave nothing of interest to film enthusiasts. It feels like a 1990s extended sketch show. 

In fact, the only discourse that kept me thinking about Ladies First was how on earth they landed the cast that they did. Rosamund Pike is far too good for a film of this calibre, and the fact that Fiona Shaw, Charles Dance, Emily Mortimer, and Richard E. Grant also appear is frankly astounding. The role that Grant finds himself in is perhaps the weirdest thing of all! 

Utterly abysmal.