REVIEW: Bad Day at the Office ★★★☆☆

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2026

If waking up after a heavy night with a raging headache wasn't bad enough, imagine waking up in a trashed hotel room with absolutely no idea who you are, a dead body in the bath and people apparently trying to kill you.

And you thought your Monday mornings were bad.

Bad Day at the Office had its World Premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, opening the festival's wonderfully bonkers Midnight Madness strand — and "Midnight Madness" might be the most appropriate place imaginable for it.

Directed by Chee Keong Cheung and starring Scotland's own John Hannah, this is not a film particularly interested in subtlety.

It's violent.

It's ridiculous.

It's incredibly loud.

And occasionally it feels as though someone has handed you a controller and dropped you directly into a video game.

The film follows Karl Davis (Hannah), who wakes up in a wrecked London hotel room with no memory of how he got there — or even who he is.

Things get considerably worse when he discovers a corpse in the bathtub.

Before long, Karl is joined by hotel maid Molly, played by Radha Mitchell, and the pair find themselves hurtling through London trying to uncover what's actually happening while seemingly everybody they encounter wants them dead.

Pretty standard day at the office, really.

What makes Bad Day at the Office different is the way Cheung chooses to tell the story.

The film is shot almost entirely from a first-person perspective, using GoPro cameras to put us directly into the action. We don't simply watch Karl get punched, chased, shot at and thrown around London.

We're coming along for the ride.

It's an ambitious idea and, particularly during the action sequences, there are moments when it works brilliantly.

Fight scenes become frantic and chaotic, bullets fly past the camera and the whole thing has the feel of a first-person shooter brought to life.

Health meters, on-screen graphics and other video-game influences aren't exactly subtle either.

At first, it's great fun.

The problem is that Bad Day at the Office doesn't seem to know when enough is enough.

There's only so much frantic GoPro footage, rapid editing, blood, fighting, explosions and general carnage you can throw at an audience before something that initially felt exciting starts becoming exhausting.

And this film throws everything at you.

Then throws some more.

Then possibly beats you over the head with a fish.

Yes. Really.

At 106 minutes, the first-person gimmick begins to wear thin long before the credits arrive. What initially makes the film stand out eventually becomes one of the things holding it back.

Even ordinary conversations can feel strange when they're forced through the same POV format, while the relentless action sometimes becomes more numbing than exciting.

Thankfully, John Hannah gives the film something incredibly important:

John Hannah.

There's a likeability and dry Scottish charm to him that somehow survives despite spending much of the film as a pair of arms attached to a GoPro.

He's also wonderfully unexpected casting for this sort of hyper-violent action film, which only makes watching him batter his way through increasingly ridiculous situations more entertaining.

Radha Mitchell joins the chaos as Molly, while Tamer Hassan clearly understands exactly what sort of film he's in and has fun with gangster Solomon.

The humour won't work for everyone.

It's deliberately daft, frequently crude and occasionally feels like it's escaped from a video game made about twenty years ago. Sometimes it lands. Sometimes you may find yourself wondering what on earth you're watching.

But there's also something quite admirable about a film committing this enthusiastically to its own insanity.

Nobody involved appears to have said:

"Maybe tone it down a little?"

And frankly, I'm not convinced Cheung would have listened if they had.

Underneath all the blood and explosions there are some interesting ideas, particularly as the film begins questioning the video-game logic it has spent most of its runtime embracing.

Unfortunately, some of that arrives rather late.

Had the film shaved some time from its middle and resisted the temptation to make every action sequence bigger and crazier than the last, there could have been a much tighter and more effective action thriller hiding underneath.

Instead, Bad Day at the Office is an assault on the senses.

Whether that's a recommendation or a warning probably depends entirely on what you want from your cinema experience.

If the idea of John Hannah rampaging through London inside what feels like a completely unhinged first-person shooter sounds fantastic...

you may have just found your film.

If shaky cameras make you motion sick?

Maybe bring a bucket.

Original, technically ambitious and completely bonkers, Bad Day at the Office deserves credit for trying something different — even if its biggest strength ultimately becomes its biggest weakness.

I admire the madness.

I just wish there was slightly less of it.

★★★☆☆ – 3/5

Bad Day at the Office had its World Premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 13 August 2026 as the opening film of the Midnight Madness strand.