The Brothers Sun will kick your ass and make you laugh
I don’t want to leap to hyperbole in the first week of the year, but I am quite confident in saying that The Brothers Sun has the best fight scene with men in inflatable dinosaur costumes that I’ve seen in 2024. Sure, it’s the only one I’ve seen in this or any year, and I doubt there will be another anytime soon. But that doesn’t diminish how much it kicks ass. It’s simply great to start the year with a show that capably gives me something I’ve been lacking in television for some time: a series that is just as interested in good goofs as it is killer brawls.
Created by Byron Wu and Brad Falchuk (co-creator of many shows in the Ryan Murphy empire, from American Horror Story to Glee), the new Netflix martial arts dramedy — there’s something you don’t get to say every day! — introduces viewers to Bruce Sun (Sam Song Li), a regular-ass nerd living in LA. A bit of a pushover, Bruce loves improv comedy more than anything, so much so that he’ll spend college tuition money on comedy classes and let himself get talked into selling drugs by his best friend — which would be a problem for him, if he were any good at it.
Bruce doesn’t know this, but he’s also Triad royalty. His father, Big Sun (Johnny Kou), leads one of the most respected gangs in Taipei, and someone’s targeting them all. This is how Bruce finally reunites with his long-lost older brother, Charles (Justin Chien), who flies in from Taiwan to protect Bruce and their mother, Eileen (Michelle Yeoh), after an assassination attempt on their father.
The Brothers Sun kicks off with such a heavy setup and brutal opening fight scene that it’s easy to think it’s more of a serious crime drama than it actually is. Sure, all that is there, and quite satisfying. But it’s all in
Read more on polygon.com
