Donnie Yen Provides SLEEPING DOGS Proof Of Life
Have you played Sleeping Dogs? It's a pretty great game, unsung at the time of its original release, combining Grand Theft Auto open-world shenanigans and Arkham Asylum melee combat with an authentic Hong Kong action-thriller setting and story.
Talk of a film adaptation has been circulating for ages, but thanks to a surprise Instagram post from star and all-around legendary dude Donnie Yen, we now have some indication the project is still alive.
There's perilously little information about Sleeping Dogs out there on the internet (unless you count the dystopian 1977 Roger Donaldson film that kickstarted Sam Neill's career and the entire New Zealand film industry). But Yen seems insistent that it is, indeed happening. That's more than one can say for the video game franchise, whose creator United Front Games was shut down in 2016.
Like many video game adaptations, adapting Sleeping Dogs is a bit of an odd proposition. The game owes its entire existence to Hong Kong crime thrillers, and its innovations lie mostly in how that genre was adapted into a game in the first place. So a Sleeping Dogs movie is just...another Hong Kong thriller, attached to an IP that doesn't bring a hell of a lot with it other than minor name recognition. The real name recognition here, of course, is Yen, who is beloved in China and has been slowly breaking into the US via Star Wars and XXX.
The Sleeping Dogs movie could well release this year, if it gets its shit together, but you can play the original game now, on PC or any modern console other than Switch. Sorry, Switch. (On the other hand, at the rate games are being ported to that platform, who knows what tomorrow could bring?)
This post has been edited; originally it claimed that the film was in production, but upon closer inspection, it seems Yen's Instagram post is more a statement of intent.
