Can someone do a wellness check on Sacha Baron Cohen?
The man who changed comedy with "Borat" back in 2006 hasn't been the same for some time. His irreverent shtick, be it as that faux foreign journalist or via "Da Ali G Show," screamed that a subversive comic superstar had arrived.
Not so fast.
Cohen's follow-up comedies ("Bruno," "The Dictator," "The Brothers Grimm") grew increasingly worse. He revived his signature character for "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm," a vehicle designed to dethrone President Donald Trump, not make us howl.
Now, this.
Cohen's "Ladies First" went straight to Netflix, not traditional theaters. It's easy to see why.
The bigger question is why anyone would release an uber-woke comedy in 2026. The film stinks, but it would have made far more sense had it been released during 2020's "Summer of Love" protests.
Cohen stars as Damien, a hard-charging chauvinist gunning for a promotion at his advertising firm. He's forced to give a sweet gig to a female colleague for "optics," but he's too clumsy to hide that embarrassing detail. ("Ladies First" is actually a blow to DEI policies, but it doesn't even realize it.)
His fight with the aggrieved co-worker (Rosamund Pike) leads to him getting bonked in the head by a lamppost.
When he wakes up, everything has changed. The Patriarchy is now ... The Matriarchy. Pike's character is now his boss. Burger King is called Burger Queen (get it?), and Damien is whistled at when he walks by a construction site.
You get the idea, and it's not a terrible concept for a comedy on paper. Except "Ladies First" is obsessed with what The Critical Drinker calls "The Message."
Said message is that it's a man's world, and that's a terrible, awful, no good state of affairs. That means every molecule of "Ladies First" is dedicated to driving that message home. The story can't breathe as a result.
Nor can the film's romantic coupling between Cohen and Pike. Zero chemistry alert!
Every scene, every character, every moment is made to remind you how awful The Patriarchy is. Does that sound remotely funny? It's not.
It's Hannah Gadsby: The Movie.
Even Damien's attempts at "looksmaxxing" fall flat. If you want to see a great waxing sequence, there's always "The 40-Year-Old Virgin."
Not "Ladies First."
There's just nothing funny here, just a series of strained set pieces meant to flip the gender roles and scream how unfair life is for women. Except the film is set in modern-day America, not the 1950s, when some of these tropes actually existed.
Heck, the sexism embedded in "Mad Men" would be an improvement over what "Ladies First" suggests.
Even the film's attempt at magical realism-style whimsy fails. The great Richard E. Grant plays a homeless person who explains the Matriarchy switcheroo to Damien. No sale here, either.
There's rich potential in seeing a chauvinist learn the error of his ways, let alone fall for a woman who was his workplace frenemy. Neither element pays off here.
"Ladies First" will be remembered as a cultural artifact, the dying breath of a woke movement that stormed Hollywood for far too long. As for Cohen, it's time to seriously reconsider why the genius behind "Borat" went so wrong.
