Netflix’s The Brothers Sun will leave you going both ways

I don’t want to exaggerate the first week of the year, but I can say this with confidence The Sun Brothers has the best fight scene with men in inflatable dinosaur costumes I’ve seen in 2024. Sure, it’s the only one I’ve seen this year or any other, and I doubt there will be another one anytime soon. But that doesn’t take away from how great it is. It’s just great to start the year with a show that skillfully offers something I’ve been missing from television for some time: a series that’s as interested in good bloopers as it is in killer brawls.

Created by Byron Wu and Brad Falchuk (co-creators of many shows in the Ryan Murphy empire, by American horror story To Joy), Netflix’s new martial arts dramedy – there’s something you can’t say every day! – introduces viewers to Bruce Sun (Sam Song Li), a regular nerd living in LA. Bruce is a bit of a wimp, but he loves improv comedy more than anything, so much so that he spends college tuition on comedy classes and lets his best friend talk him into selling drugs – which would be a problem for him if he wasn’t good in this.

Bruce doesn’t know this, but he’s also a member of the Triad. His father, Big Sun (Johnny Kou), leads one of the most respected gangs in Taipei, and someone has their sights set on them all. 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.

Photo: James Clark/Netflix

The Sun Brothers The film begins with such a violent build-up and brutal opening fight scene that one could easily be forgiven for thinking it was more of a serious crime drama than it actually is. Sure, that’s all There, and quite satisfactory. But it’s all in the service of a family dramedy, as Eileen insists that Bruce stick to the normal life she brought him to LA for, even as he finds himself drawn ever deeper into a simmering, over-the-top gang war in which he has to fight on a regular basis leaving masked martial arts masters in the lurch.

But what does The Sun Brothers What really sings is that its comedy isn’t limited to Bruce Sun’s hapless antics in the face of his mother and brother’s overcompetence; The show’s writers and choreographers work hard to spread the laughs. Charles isn’t just the tough older brother – his savvy is undermined by the assumption that knowing the Chinese half of Chinese-American culture is enough to get by. This leads to him regularly making mistakes and being taken advantage of (such as being tricked into delivering a giant lizard) or embarrassing himself (through his low spice tolerance).

The fights in The Sun Brothers are also full of humor. The dino suit fight mentioned above culminates in one Murderer

Image: Netflix

There’s a lot to love The Sun Brothers – the way it delights in cross-cultural peculiarities and equally enjoys lush recordings of mahjong games, churros frying and improv shows; how well it builds its genre thrills around a family story; how driving the plot of the eight episodes is. If there are any problems, it’s how insignificant it all feels. A complaint that’s rare for a Netflix drama is that the series just holds up To move too fast for it to feel entirely real to anyone, and yet the characters are portrayed as just grounded enough to prevent them from drifting into cartoonish caricatures. Stop and think about it, and the series fits too neatly in the liminal space between what you saw last and what you’ll see next, a very fun binge that doesn’t quite last long.

Not the killers in dinosaur suits, though. They linger quite well.

The Sun Brothers is now streaming on Netflix.