The Edinburgh International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness strand will be well served by this incredibly energetic and memorable, one-of-a-kind feature, if for no better reason than its sheer, unabashed commitment to its central conceit.
Filmed entirely with GoPros as a means of throwing us head-first into the action, this new film from Action Xtreme and director Chee Keong Cheung throws everything and anything at the wall to see what sticks. It’ll certainly divide audiences, bar one topic: nobody will be left wishing it were louder.
‘Hello? Hellooo? You alright, buddy? Might’ve had a bit too much to drink!’
‘How do you run from a life you can’t remember?’ asks the film’s tag-line, as our protagonist, Karl (John Hannah) wakes up in a trashed hotel room with amnesia and a body in the bathtub. You know, as you do.
To make matters worse, he’s already got policemen knocking on his door (probably on account of the corpse, I’d wager) and very little chance of escaping alive without the help of Molly (Radha Mitchell), a plucky housekeeper who seems to know him from somewhere.
Before long, it’s the pair of them versus the world – quite literally Scott Pilgrim style, as the film leans into its video game influences with full fervour. Karl is, for all intents and purposes, the player character through which we view this mad, mad world full of bloodthirsty characters out to score the bounty on his head.
Cheung directly quotes first-person shooters, right down to the bloody, bombastic kill cams of countless enemies (and, worryingly, several scores of people who were really just in the wrong place at the wrong time). There are also on-screen leaderboards, a whole host of brash and often obnoxious sound effects (Cheung seems to love a fart gag) as well as omnipresent onomatopoeic annotations that appear in purple-pink sharpie all over the screen like some cartoonish heads-up display.
I really wanted to give this one a thorough recommendation. The film’s pitched as a kind of John Wick or Bullet Train experience, but taken even further, which sounded excellent if pulled off correctly, but for as much as the film is memorable for its brashness, the idea of just cranking everything up to its absolute extremes isn’t nearly as fun in practice as it sounds on paper.
The story is split into chapters, each one based on one location, like levels of a game, and while the opening fifteen minutes or so were interesting for the sheer novelty of the premise (this kind of perspective has been done before, yes, but rarely), that enjoyment faded fast and never really reappeared.
While this is clearly the unadulterated (and very often unhinged) vision that Cheung as the director no doubt intended to bring to the screen, it’s incredibly loud and disorganised in its approach. Yes, its slapdash sensibilities are baked into the product (glaring similarities with The Hangover and The Matrix are lampshaded) but many plot beats still feel far too referential and the weight of Bad Day at the Office’s many, many plot elements works against a coherent story.
The film often leans into spoof territory – Karl and Molly’s journey feels a lot like The Running Man set during the night of The Purge, right down to the comedy characters who hunt them down. Allies and foes come and go, and allegiances change faster than you can say ‘Throw me the idol!’ so that by the end, you really have no idea what on Earth is going on.
That may well sound like your cup of tea (or your double shot of tequila) and that end, it’s worth highlighting that I do think there’s an audience for something as outrageous as this. I’m rather glad to have seen it for how vivid it was, at least, and the prospect of a Wednesday night showing in 4DX at Cineworld (a late addition to the festival programme) feels like a perfect fit for a film pitched at this breakneck speed. To me, though, I could’ve done with a much clearer, simpler story, a much shorter runtime and less juvenile humour to turn this Bad Day into something Elbow would want to sing about.
This film has an age rating of 18.
Bad Day at the Office is showing 13-14 August at EIFF, with a 4DX screening at Cineworld Edinburgh on 19 August. It releases in the UK on 30 October.
