Bad Day At The Office, 2026.
Directed by Chee Keong Cheung.
Starring John Hannah, Radha Mitchell, Tamer Hassan, Roxanne McKee, Tim Fellingham.
SYNOPSIS:
A man wakes up in a hotel room with no memory. There is a corpse in the bathroom. He and a maid attempt to uncover the conspiracy surrounding him while evading the police and those following them.
Bad Day at the Office is all geared towards what might be termed an ‘immersive experience.’ That is, it uses first-person viewpoint FPV to get the audience into the heart of the film and what the lead is going through. The lead is John Hannah, and his Karl Davis character has just woken up in a hotel room with no clue of how he got there or who he is – he learns his name from a consignment of prescription pills. In the adjoining bathroom is a corpse and a lot of blood. So far, so grim. We then switch to the viewpoint of a hotel maid (Radha Mitchell) who stumbles into Davis’s room just as he’s fighting off some psychopathic policemen. Once that’s been dealt with, the pair have to get out of the hotel and survive, and, like the audience, discover just what is going on.
I really wanted to like Bad Day at The Office. Any kind of mystery involving amnesia and conspiracy is intriguing to my tastes, and with this I was hoping for something along the lines of Memento or Total Recall souped up by modern pyrotechnics and imagery. The Bourne Identity also worked these storylines pretty well. The problem to me with this particular piece was that the video game action comes so thick and fast it’s rarely clear just what is going on. The story is paper thin. The ‘humour’ is a mix of not taking extreme violence seriously, along with a copious supply of fart gags.
The plot points of a conspiracy out to get Davis run along familiar FPS game cycles of fleeing from one fight to the next. The actual feel of the film is a bit like early 2000s FPS console games, and it would be argued by many gamers that most modern productions are a good deal more complex and imaginative than this. But still, on a more positive note, the choreography is impressive. The combat scenes have plenty of punch about them, despite the hugely distracting comic book graphics of message board-style commentary. It is almost as though you’ve got a highly caffeinated teenager from 25 years ago providing snarky remarks about the action.
The trouble is the whole set-up is hugely disorientating. The frenetic pace of the feature is very game-like as the characters progress through levels, and there is some sort of end-of-level boss to fight at the end of the scene. Although the costumes of these villains are impressive, there is no indication of who they are or why they are doing this. In a video game world, this may not matter, of course, but for anyone who is interested in motivation and character analysis – I can imagine those late 90’s, early 2000s chat room members giving a ‘ROFL’ at this – is likely to be disappointed.
I think there certainly is an audience for this; although a niche one for sure. The filmmakers, and Hannah and Mitchell, can be congratulated on taking a risk with the experimentation at work here. It didn’t work for me, but that’s not to to say that some won’t get it.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert W Monk
