LADIES FIRST

Netflix

Ladies - grab the nearest brick, baseball bat, cricket bat, pool cue, plank o’ wood, spanner, wrench, BAFTA, Oscar, Tony, Grammy, Employee of the Week Award, hammer, tome, concrete block, frozen cut o’ meat (as per one of my favourite ever short stories, Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter), bottle (full, methinks, for the weight of it…): there is a way to give women the power they deserve in the world, but it requires near-homicidal-level blunt force trauma (to the men, obvs). It goes without saying that I clicked onto Netflix’s LADIES FIRST with the glorious energy of a Thursday night hate-watch. I’d seen the trailer and heard a few mutterings and the whole thing sounded entirely, unbelievably, fucking awful… right? Right. Obvs. Definitely.

Essentially a body-swap comedy along the lines of super-duper classics FREAKY FRIDAY, BIG, LIKE FATHER LIKE SON, 13 GOING ON 30 (it’s an entire sub-genre!), LADIES FIRST gives us Sacha Baron Cohen as a misogynistnic man-boss-type who knocks himself out on a lamp-post and wakes up in a world where the genders are reversed: in these new environs he has to contend with Harriet Potter, Queen’s Cross, horrific male beauty standards, a male pay gap, wolf whistles from women on the street, etc etc etc. Blunt force trauma, indeed. Let’s not underestimate it. I’m up for wielding a baton if you are?

Only… and very, very weirdly… and surprisingly… and worryingly… I kinda loved it. And I’m not even drunk! I don’t know if it is the unpredictable, uncanny weather or my maudlin mood or this craz-za-zy non-birthday week (it was my dead mother’s birthday yesterday and my ex-husband’s birthday today, so nothing whatsoever to celebrate…) or whatever the fuck else is going on in the world, but I LOLled throughout the first 45 mins of this super silly, obvious as shit, coulda been written over lunch on a napkin, but also very, very funny film. At a certain point the jokes get a little tired, and so did I, and I started to question whether making fun and games of the incredibly discriminatory and inequitable world in which we live was really worthy of my attention. I am always up for making a joke about the darkest parts of our lives (hit me up for hilarity about death, grief, illness, cancer, divorce, suicide…. I have something for everyone!), but ultimately (and certainly if you’re offering a 90 minute feature film) the conversation needs to come back around to something more authentic. More genuine. More in keeping with the values we need to preserve and have to hand if we are to have any license at all to make a joke about the entirely, frustratingly, horrifically unfair and discriminatory world in which we live.

And LADIES FIRST misses that ultimate target, imo, and does not quite meet the overall standards that justify the (very, very funny…) jokes (just watch it… I ain’t judgin’!). Plus, Sasha Baron Cohen is kinda unwatchable in a dark-n-sleazy kinda way right now, isn’t he (even if Rosamund Pike makes up for it + a country mile with her watchability…. And even if he remains on my list of potential second husbands… albeit near the bottom… Bad idea?… I ain’t judgin’ you, so don’t judge me!)? ⭐️⭐️⭐️