Bad Day at the Office review: John Hannah runs riot in Go-Pro gangland thriller

A 64-year-old John Hannah parkours through gangland London in Bad Day at the Office, a hyperactive action thriller shot largely on first-person Go-Pro cameras. The Guardian's review, published 26 October, calls the result "like Peep Show on PCP" and compares its chaotic energy to a ride in "a monster-truck tyre rolled down Mount Everest".

The film's premise inverts familiar genre setups. Hannah plays Karl Davis, an amnesiac who wakes in a hotel room resembling "a Hangover-like bombsite". He has a splitting headache. Party debris covers the floor. A dead body lies in the bathtub.

What is wrong with Karl Davis?

Davis has left himself a box of pills and a note instructing him to take one whenever his heart rate climbs too high. That happens roughly ten seconds into his waking day. Two fake police officers arrive to search the room. Davis dispatches them with what the review calls "scary efficiency".

The maid, Molly — played by Radha Mitchell — then walks through the door. She is the woman Davis spent the previous night with. The review notes the scenario reads like Crank inverted: instead of keeping adrenaline pumping to stay alive, the hero must keep his pulse down to survive.

The Guardian's critic writes that the film is "relentlessly committed to packing the frame with gratuitously entertaining gimmickry". It annotates its own action in pink graffiti captions — at one point tallying how many people the hero has knocked unconscious with a dildo. That self-annotation, the review suggests, means the film "borderline qualifies as experimental cinema".

Does the first-person device work?

According to the review, yes, in one specific way. The Go-Pro perspective "helps us buy that John Hannah, 64, is a parkour genius". The camera does the athletic credibility the premise demands.

The critic frames the film through two comic touchstones. Its cumulative effect resembles Peep Show — the sitcom famous for its first-person point-of-view shots — pushed to a chemical extreme. Its hungover-amnesia opening borrows the structure of The Hangover, while its heartbeat mechanic echoes Crank, the 2006 film in which Jason Statham's character must keep his adrenaline up.

What does this change for viewers?

The review positions Bad Day at the Office as a gimmick film that knows exactly what it is: "ludicrous", "rabid" and, in the critic's estimation, "gratuitously entertaining". For audiences, the pitch is simple — a short, breathless genre hybrid held together by Hannah's unlikely action-hero turn and a camera that never sits still.

The review's headline verdict frames it as a cross between Crank and The Hangover — a film that keeps its hero's heart rate down while pushing the audience's up.