Bad Day at the Office opens in the debris field of someone else's night: hotel room trashed, stranger in the shower, corpse in the bathtub, and a note from your past self instructing you to take a pill before your heart rate spikes. It spikes within 10 seconds. Director Chee Keong Cheung establishes the game immediately — this is Crank's pharmaceutical panic repackaged as a Hangover-style mystery, filmed largely through GoPro cameras strapped to its characters. The GoPro conceit does actual work here, not just aesthetic dressing. It lets John Hannah — 64, not typically associated with parkour — read as genuinely dangerous, because you're seeing the world from his eyeline rather than watching him do wire-work from a medium shot. The frame becomes a weapon. When Karl Davis trounces a pair of fake cops in his hotel room, the spatial disorientation of the first-person cut makes it feel fast and ugly in exactly the right way. Cheung has form. His Lagos-set Son of the Soil showed he understands kinetic action. Here, the hyperactivity is dialled well past useful, but the film earns it during its first hour: a machine-gun-toting killer-clown DJ, a multi-storey car park parkour chase, a nightclub fight conducted with a dildo, a plunger, and a stream of urine. The pink graffiti annotations — helpfully counting unconscious bodies, labelling improvised weapons — tip the film briefly into something like experimental cinema, or at least the most deranged version of a DVD commentary track. The crack in the structure appears around the hour mark. Cheung finds the actual plot and the film deflates. The gangland-retribution mechanics underneath the chaos are not interesting, and once the film has to serve them, the novelty budget runs out. The better version of this film would have stayed in the chaos longer — there's a genuinely lovely interlude where Molly browses a patisserie while Karl is clawing across rooftops that hints at a film more confident in its own absurdism. That film got cut for pace. The pace problem is real. At 111 minutes, Bad Day at the Office is about 20 minutes too long — which is brutal for a film this committed to hyperventilation. Cheung mistakes sustained velocity for escalation. By the third act, the GoPro gimmick stops being a formal choice and starts feeling like a tic. The film teaches you how to watch it in the first act, then stops surprising you in the second. Hannah and Radha Mitchell are game throughout, but they're carrying plot machinery that isn't as interesting as the chaos that preceded it. What Cheung has made is a genuinely fun first hour attached to a disappointingly conventional second one. The editing is a masterclass in the wrong direction — demonstrating precisely how pacing and runtime interact, specifically by showing what happens when you don't cut twenty minutes that should have been cut. This is a film that would play brilliantly as a tight 88-minute theatrical version. At 111, it tests your patience in inverse proportion to how much goodwill it earns upfront.
