5 hours ago
22
This ludicrous, rabid thriller, shot largely on first-person GoPros, is like Peep Show on PCP. The cumulative effect is of being crammed into a monster-truck tyre and rolled down Mount Everest. It is relentlessly committed to packing the frame with gratuitously entertaining gimmickry, and needlessly annotates the action in pink graffiti – for example, totting up at one point how many people the hero has knocked unconscious with a dildo – so that it borderline qualifies as experimental cinema. Among the many advantages of its perspective is that it helps us buy that John Hannah, 64, is a parkour genius.
Hannah plays Karl Davis – or that is apparently his name, when this amnesiac wakes up to a Hangover-like bombsite of a hotel room. He’s got a banging headache, party detritus is littered everywhere, and there is a dead body in the bathtub. Or perhaps this scenario is Crank inverted; Davis has left a box of pills and a note to self to take one whenever his heart rate gets too elevated. Which of course happens 10 seconds later. A pair of fake police officers arrive to search the room, only for Davis to trounce them with scary efficiency, just as maid Molly (Radha Mitchell), with whom he shacked up the night before, walks through the door.
Director Chee Keong Cheung showed promising kinetic-action chops with last year’s more serious Lagos-set thriller Son of the Soil. But his hyperactivity is constantly in the red here, as the film flips manically between the perspectives of Karl, Molly and Ivan (Tim Fellingham), a Serbian gangster whose dad was in the tub. As the price on Karl’s head rises, there’s hardly any time to register the delirious barrage through the London underworld: parkouring down a multi-storey car park, dodging a machine gun-toting killer-clown DJ, fending off nightclub patrons using only the aforementioned sex toy, a plunger and a stream of his own urine.
It’s kind of glorious. But, unsurprisingly Cheung can’t keep the novelty level up. Once he gets back to the actual plot after the hour mark, the film reverts to less-than-interesting gangland-retribution shtick. Even making allowances for the hypersonic tempo, Cheung also misses opportunities for adding more deft interludes such as the one in which Molly browses patisserie while Karl is scrabbling across rooftops. If nothing else, Bad Day at the Office is an editor’s lesson in the relationship between pacing and the viewing experience: at 111 hyperventilating minutes, it feels about six hours long.
English (US) ·