Bad Day At The Office Review: First Person Chaos

Chee Keong Cheung’s Bad Day At The Office is a hyperactive, violent and grotesque first-person actioner that works better than expected.

Bad Day At The Office’s irreverent tone and no-holds-barred action might not be for everyone, but those willing to give it a chance will certainly never get bored by it.

The film starts with Karl Davis (Hannah) waking up in a hotel room in London. He has no memories; he’s surrounded by evidence of debauchery, and when he enters the bathroom, he finds a bloodied corpse inside the bathtub, with the word RUN painted with blood on a nearby wall. But he doesn’t have a lot of time to think about his present situation. He soon finds out he has to take heart pills every hour, otherwise his heart rate starts going through the roof. And he’s also attacked by the police, who don’t seem to be acting according to the law. Thankfully, he manages to meet up with Molly the Maid (Radha Mitchell), who seems to know him from before, and decides to help him escape the hotel and find the truth about what’s going on.

Plot-wise, there’s nothing too complicated about Bad Day At The Office. The movie feels like a mixture between The Bourne Identity and 2015’s Hardcore Henry, with a dash of The Hangover for good measure. The idea of having an amnesiac protagonist is not original at all, but it’s at least well used here, turning the script’s central mystery into one of its strengths. It certainly helps that Bad Day At The Office doesn’t take itself too seriously. This is a ridiculous affair, more interesting in entertaining its audience with violence and grotesqueries than in exploring the human condition.

Because, first and foremost, Bad Day At The Office is an action picture, and a first-person action picture at that. It cuts between different POVs, usually Karl’s and someone else’s (like Molly’s), occasionally using visual techniques such as split-screens to convey more in very little time. Since the movie never pretends to be realistic, it doesn’t really tell its story in real time, using ellipsis whenever it pleases, as well as some creative (yet sometimes dizzying) camerawork. Bad Day At The Office is not for the faint of heart (which feels appropriate, considering its protagonist’s condition); between the aggressive and fast camera moves and the occasional light flashes, it might make some viewers vomit.

Funnily enough, Bad Day At The Office’s visual flourishes never feel out of place, though; they actually help develop the film’s style and tone, which very obviously references video games. There are text and graphic overlays which announce character appearances (and deaths), as well as kill counts and other important information that complements the dialogue and actions. Colour correction is overly saturated, sometimes nauseatingly so, and neon lights are favoured during most scenes, giving the whole experience a rather harsh look. Bad Day At The Office is by no means a subtle film, and its lack of subtlety is precisely what makes it work.

Unfortunately, it’s always possible to have too much of a good thing, and in this case, we end up having too much of something that already feels quite saturated. There is no reason for Bad Day At The Office to be almost two hours long; there are sections in the second act that are prolonged in needless fashion, as well as action sequences that could have been trimmed for pacing. A ninety-minute cut of Bad Day At The Office would have felt even leaner and meaner, without exhausting its audience quite as much as this final cut. What I did enjoy, though, was the ending. Let’s just say that the film ends up justifying its video-gamey aesthetics, making its decisions related to visual language feel much more earned and logical.

The performances are all appropriate for this kind of material. Playing against type, John Hannah is completely believable as a man who can fight, use everything from firearms to dildos to kill people, and even perform parkour. He might not remember a lot about his past, but at least he remembers how to kick ass. For her part, the ever-underrated Radha Mitchell seems to be having a lot of fun playing Molly. And although most secondary characters are paper-thin and don’t show up for a long time, I did enjoy Tim Fellingham’s performance as antagonist Ivan. And I particularly enjoyed the way (and the reason why) his POV was sometimes distorted (especially when he’s first introduced, killing a young police officer played by Alex Britt).

Bad Day At The Office is a nasty little movie. Did it really need to show its protagonist digging out his pills from a pool of vomit and taking them immediately after? No. Did it need to include more cheesy one-liners per minute than the average Schwarzenegger eighties movie? Maybe. And did it need to shoot everything with wide-angle lenses and bright neon colours, making London look like a caricature of itself? Probably not. The film is a lot; it’s a lot of decisions, a lot of violence and (sometimes practical, sometimes digital) bodily fluids, and a lot of style. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it results in a rather fun and hyperkinetic experience. Bad Day At The Office is, thankfully, a good time at the movies.

Bad Day At The Office is now available to watch in U.K. and Irish cinemas. In the U.S. the film will be distributed by Well Go USA Entertainment.