Ladies First

You sit down for a Sacha Baron Cohen movie and you brace for comedy. Jokes. Chaos. Something that makes you laugh hard enough to feel a little guilty about it. That is not what this is. This is a dramedy, and I say that with a straight face, because I don't know what else to call a movie that keeps setting up the laugh and then deciding it would rather teach you something.

The setup is the misogynistic executive who learns a lesson. You know this guy. You have met this guy in a dozen movies. And about twenty minutes in I sat there going, hmm, I have seen this before. It's What Women Want with Gibson. If lesson movies are your thing, honestly, go watch Mel do it.

Disappointing.

So what saved it from being a total wash? The supporting cast. Rosamund Pike is terrific. Charles Dance is Charles Dance, which is to say he shows up and immediately makes the scene better. And the bench behind them is deeper than this movie deserved. Every time the story handed one of them a stretch of screen time, I perked up.

I'll also give the movie this: how he gets where he's going is creative. Not the destination, the destination is telegraphed from the poster. But the mechanism of it, the way the thing actually happens to him, that's a genuinely fun idea. And I'm glad he learns his lesson. I'm never going to complain about a guy learning a lesson.

The problem is the guy himself. Cohen is trying. You can see him trying, and I applaud the effort, I really do, because he's not coasting here. He's swinging. It just doesn't fit. His character feels like he wandered in from another script and everyone else politely made room. Whatever chemistry is supposed to exist between the man and the story he's in, it never quite clicks.

So I got a predictable arc, one clever bit of machinery, and a supporting cast doing the heavy lifting while the lead labors uphill. I watched it solo, I stayed to the end, and by the next morning I couldn't have told you three things about it.

Disappointing. Not offensive, not a waste of a night, just a movie I already knew the ending of before it started. I wouldn't go back to it.