EIFF 2026: Bad Day at the Office
Chee Keong Cheung’s John Hannah-starring Bad Day at the Office takes its action cues from first-person video games, but unfortunately that's also the level of its drama. Still, Hannah's charm shines through
It’s clear from the off that Chee Keong Cheung’s first-person action movie Bad Day at the Office takes most of its cues from videogames, right down to the health meters and boss fights. What is slightly surprising is that it seems to be drawing specifically on the videogames of the early 2000s – not just in the film's Mirror’s Edge-esque parkour sequences but in the hyper-irreverent brand of humour, gleefully blending brutal violence with goofy slapstick. When our hero starts beating a guy up with a fish, you can practically hear the chorus of “LMFAOs” and “ROFLs”.
Karl (John Hannah) wakes up in a trashed hotel room with no memory, a dead body in his bathtub and some very angry coppers at the door. He teams up with Molly (Radha Mitchell), who works as a maid at the hotel, and they head off on a quest for answers that will take them through violent nightclubs, deadly subway carriages, spas full of katana-wielding yakuza and other scenarios that usually come with XPs.
Unfortunately, its turn-of-the-millennium videogame quality extends to the film’s dramatic chops. While Hannah’s cheeky EK charm occasionally manages to shine through, Karl is exactly the sort of blank slate protagonist that once dominated gaming, while Mitchell’s performance is ineffectively hammy.
Our protagonists often make up for the fact that we can’t see them by narrating their own actions, and by moving their arms in a way that keeps them clearly on screen but which would look utterly bizarre to anyone else with them in the room. And while the first-person view gives the fight scenes an enjoyably frantic GoPro quality, it also makes it very difficult to hide the more obvious stage punches. Plus, it turns out that a simple shot/reverse shot conversation is a sin against cinema when it’s carried out in POV.