Ladies First is a remake of a French film. It’s a reworking of I Am Not an Easy Man (Je ne suis pas un homme facile). I watched the French version in 2018 and thought it was pretty good. This English version had a good cast and a woman director, but it didn’t measure up to my memory of the original.

Ladies First took the same journey. A misogynistic man enjoying his privileges in a patriarchal world bonks his head and wakes up in a matriarchy. The women in charge treat men the way men in his former world treat women.

Sacha Baron Cohen stars as Damien. When he wakes up he learns that one of his former underlings, Alex (Rosamund Pike), is now his boss. Everything is changed. His receptionist Felicity (Fiona Shaw) is now the big boss and the former boss Fred (Charles Dance) is now a lackey.

Glenda (Kathryn Hunter) was the cleaning lady before. Now she’s in charge of picking the new CEO. Damien knows he should be CEO and he sets out to prove it by working harder than any of the women and giving himself a makeover to be more attractive. His competition for the job is Alex.

After being disregarded, ignored, laughed at, and forced into degrading sexual acts by Felicity, he still doesn’t grasp that women are CEOs. Not men. He keeps trying.

Of course, he learns to be a better man, to value and listen to women. You knew that was coming.

But the humor was too broad, there was no subtlety to the jokes, the points were made in such basic ways. A man constantly covered in pigeon poop (Richard E. Grant) being Damien’s counselor to the new social order didn’t strike me as funny either. I wanted it to be meaningful but found it silly. The gender flipped idea isn’t silly. It’s been well done several times. But the execution here was silly.

Thea Sharrock directed the film and the writing staff was women. Even with all that, it felt like a Sacha Baron Cohen film to me. I’ve never been able to like anything Sacha Baron Cohen does. If it felt like a Rosamund Pike movie instead, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more.

I’m sure it will be in the top 10 new movies on Netflix for a while because of the cast and the fact that it’s a comedy. I hope all those folks who watch it find it better than I did.