Bad Day At The Office film review: First-person frenzy
John Hannah enters the action world with a draining, Call Of Duty-influenced assault on the senses
Hectic is one way to describe Chee Keong Cheung’s Bad Day At The Office, an action-thriller with video game vibes that received its world premiere at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, opening the Midnight Madness strand. The film recalls 2015’s Hardcore Henry, with Cheung (Redcon-1, Son Of The Soil) electing to shoot entirely first-person, using GoPro cameras attached to the actors.
John Hannah gets a rare chance to flex his Jason Statham-like muscles, playing a man who wakes up in a trashed London hotel with amnesia unaware of who he is, what he does for a living and why there’s a corpse in the bathroom with the word ‘run’ scrawled in his blood on the wall. Utterly disoriented, he enlists the help of Molly (Radha Mitchell), a skittish hotel maid who joins him for an insanely violent trawl through the city’s underworld.
Echoing first-person shooters such as Call Of Duty, this is an ambitious actioner that mixes dark humour (partly thanks to cartoonish asides scrawled in text on screen) with a convoluted plot. The nihilistic bloodshed and the woozy first-person POV which swaps between multiple characters makes it a draining watch, although Tamar Hassan’s arrival as flamboyant gangster Solomon, added to Hannah’s everyman charm, just about drags you through.
Bad Day At The Office, Cineworld, 19 August, 8.30pm, in cinemas from 30 October.