Simu Liu’s Sleeping Dogs Video Game Adaptation Moving Forward With Nobody 2 Director

Simu Liu will play undercover cop Wei Shen in the long-gestating adaptation of the run ‘n’ gun banger.

Released in 2012, Sleeping Dogs is an absolute banger of a game – a GTA-like open world action thriller set in modern day Hong Kong and drawing on, naturally enough, the rich and bloody history of Hong Kong action cinema. A big screen adaptation has long been in development. Martial arts legend Donnie Yen spent years trying to get it off the ground before finally throwing in the towel in January 2025, perhaps realising that, while still an absolute murder machine at the age of 62, he had aged out of the central role of Wei Shen, a young Chinese American cop tasked with infiltrating the Sun On Yee triad.

Enter Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings star Simu Liu, who pretty casually mentioned he was working on a film version of Sleeping Dogs back in January:

…and then things went quiet, which is pretty normal. All sorts of things are perpetually “in development” and never see the light of day. But now comes the news, once again from X, the nothing app, that the Sleeping Dogs movie has found itself a director in the form of Indonesian action expert Timo Tjajahnto.

This is incredible news. You may not know Tjahjanto, but you absolutely should. He’s only just started making waves in the US, having directed the recent Nobody 2 and the upcoming The Beekeeper 2, but has been fanging out mind-blowing stuff for years – The Night Comes For Us and The Shadow Strays, both streaming on Netflix, will knock your socks off. He’s one of the best action directors currently working and, importantly, he understands action as a genre – pretty important when adapting a game that knowingly draws on the work of directors like John Woo, Tsui Hark, and Johnnie To (I should write a Hong Kong action primer one of these days).

In addition to producing the film, Simu Liu will play our man Wei Shen, shooting and kicking his way through the neon-drenched streets of Hong Kong. Will Yun Lee, who voiced the character in the game, is about to go Greek in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, so he’s doing well for himself. No other cast members have been announced as yet, but the game itself had an impressively stacked voice roster. What are the odds that Emma Stone will reprise her role as plucky American tourist Amanda Cartwright now that she’s got two Oscars under her belt? Probably not great. James Hong, however, likes to keep himself busy, so there’s a reasonable chance the 96-year-old character actor will return. I hope so – everything’s better with James Hong.