General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Detective vs. Sleuths (神探大战)

Detective vs. Sleuths (神探大战) is a 2022 Hong Kong crime action film directed, produced, and co-written by Wai Ka-Fai, in which a disgraced, mentally ill former detective joins a police task force hunting vigilante killers who murder suspects that escaped justice in cold cases¹. It stars Lau Ching-wan (刘青云) as Lee Jun (李俊), with Charlene Choi (蔡卓妍), Raymond Lam (林峰), and Carman Lee (李若彤) in supporting roles¹. Produced by Emperor Motion Pictures, it opened in mainland China on 8 July 2022 and in Hong Kong on 21 July 2022, and went on to win four awards at the 41st Hong Kong Film Awards²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Wai Ka-Fai (director, producer, co-writer), with co-writers Ryker Chan (陈伟斌) and Mak Tin-shu (麦天枢)¹
Lead cast	Lau Ching-wan as Lee Jun, Charlene Choi as Chan Yee, Raymond Lam as Fong Lai-sun, Carman Lee as Wong Yan¹
Release	Mainland China 8 July 2022; Hong Kong 21 July 2022; Malaysia 14 July 2022; Singapore 21 July 2022; Taiwan 19 August 2022³
Runtime and languages	102 minutes; Cantonese and Mandarin²
Mainland box office	Passed 600 million yuan (including presales) within 19 days, with over 15.805 million admissions⁴
Hong Kong box office	HK$16,223,882 from 249,270 admissions over a 58-day first run⁵
Major awards	41st Hong Kong Film Awards (2023): Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Actor; Best Film nomination²

Spoilers

Plot

Hong Kong is hit by a series of brutal murders whose victims are suspects from unsolved cold cases. The killers call themselves "the Sleuths" (神探), carry out vigilante executions, and openly challenge the police, who respond by forming a special task force of their own top detectives⁶.

Lee Jun was once the police force's ace detective, nicknamed "the Sleuth," before a mental breakdown ended his career; he now lives homeless on the streets⁶. The 1905 synopsis adds that he was expelled after pointing a gun at fellow officers during the "Mad Cop" case, and that he accurately predicts the time and place of each revenge killing, drawing the attention of West Kowloon detective Chan Yee and the suspicion of her husband and colleague Fong Lai-sun and of Lee's former partner Wong Yan². To prove he is not a lunatic but the real "Sleuth," Lee joins the fight, racing against time to solve new and old cases and bring the murderous "Sleuths" to justice, while three factions of "sleuths," each with its own idea of justice, collide¹.

Relationship to Mad Detective

The film invites comparison with Mad Detective (神探, 2007), which Wai Ka-Fai co-directed with Johnnie To and in which Lau Ching-wan played a similarly disturbed ex-policeman. Wai has stated repeatedly that Detective vs. Sleuths is not a sequel; the connection is only the "mad" protagonist premise⁷. Critics note the shared elements: an edge-of-society "mad detective" with multiple personalities and a gift for reading people, a signature gesture of firing an imaginary finger-gun, and dialogue on the relationship between man and monster⁸.

The two films differ in production and intent. Mad Detective was a Milkyway Image production co-directed by Johnnie To, while Detective vs. Sleuths was made with Emperor Motion Pictures and directed by Wai alone; Wai has described the earlier film as a strongly auteurist work and the new one as an outright commercial film⁸. The commercial shift is visible on screen: gunfights, explosions, and water rescues run through the whole film, whereas Wai felt his earlier detective films, Mad Detective and Blind Detective, lacked action set pieces⁷. One review estimates that roughly 90 percent of the film is action⁹.

Production and release history

The idea had a long gestation. Wai has said that after Mad Detective he rarely directed alone, and that when Emperor Group chairman Albert Yeung suggested a film version of the TV series The Greed of Man, the idea of rebuilding the "sleuth" story came to him instead⁷. In another interview he dated the original idea to about 15 years before release and said production began about six years before¹⁰.

The film was shot in 2018, before the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed scenes of cross-border travel between the mainland and Hong Kong¹¹. Its path to cinemas was drawn out: a trailer appeared in 2019, followed by reshoots and a withdrawn release date before the film finally opened on 8 July 2022¹². Wai's working method drew attention: he writes without a finished script, producing pages on set, a habit Lau Ching-wan has worked with since the television era⁷.

The production was a mainland-Hong Kong co-production registered as such in 2018, with Emperor (Beijing) and Emperor Motion Pictures among the production companies². The story's crimes are set in Kowloon and the New Territories rather than Hong Kong Island, taking the confrontations into rural landscapes unusual for the genre¹¹.

Reception and box office

The film opened strongly in mainland China, taking 258 million yuan in its first week and topping the weekly box office in its second week with 239.8 million yuan, for a cumulative total of 394 million yuan by 17 July 2022¹²^•¹³. By day 19 the total had passed 600 million yuan, lifting it to ninth place on the 2022 mainland yearly chart, with audience scores of 9.2 on Taopiaopiao and 9.0 on Maoyan⁴. A later accounting puts its final mainland total at 710 million yuan and its Hong Kong gross at 16.9 million HKD¹⁴. It did not, however, reach the 1.3-billion-yuan tier of recent Hong Kong hits such as Raging Wings, Shock Wave 2, and The White Storm 2, a gap commentators partly attributed to the weaker drawing power of the Lau Ching-wan and Raymond Lam pairing¹⁵.

Critical response was divided along familiar lines. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100 percent critics' score from five reviews, with reviewers praising Wai's juggling of narrative threads and calling it "a big ball of outlandish fun" for fans of Hong Kong action thrillers¹⁶. Douban users settled at 7.1, with criticism aimed at loose ending logic, thin characterization, and the Mandarin dub⁸^•¹⁷. Lau Ching-wan's performance was widely praised across both camps, and it won him the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor¹⁷^•².

Overseas, the film was released across East Asia and the West and later streamed on Disney+ and other platforms; in Malaysia it was the highest-grossing Chinese film of 2022¹⁸. A sequel, Detective vs. Sleuths 2, with Wai Ka-Fai writing, has been reported in Chinese film-industry press¹⁹.

Themes and style

Commentators place the film in the "sleuth film" (神探片) tradition Wai built at Milkyway Image, running from The Suspect (1995) through Running on Karma (2003), Mad Detective (2007), and Blind Detective (2013), all about investigators whose bodies or minds work abnormally²⁰. Lee Jun is described as the most extreme of these figures: he converses with suspects in his imagination, an unscientific "psychic" ability that nonetheless directly solves cases²⁰.

The film packs many notorious Hong Kong cases into its runtime, including the "Rainy Night Butcher," "Flying Corpse," "Floating Corpse," "Cooked Corpse," and "Mad Cop" cases, connecting it to the home-grown "strange case" (奇案片) genre²⁰. The Nietzsche line "he who fights with monsters should be careful lest he become a monster" recurs three times in the film, anchoring its moral question of who the real "sleuth" is²⁰.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2020–2022 films › Released in 2022

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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