Today, during the first week of the new year, might be the perfect time for The Brothers Sun to drop. Why? Because you’re probably still hostile towards, at least, one of your relatives after something they said at Diwali, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or New Year’s Eve. Hostile family dynamics are what The Brothers Sun is all about (and it’ll make you feel a lot better about throwing that butter knife at your cousin).
After a squad of masked assassins try to reduce his lifespan—and subsequently succeed in putting a bullet in his father, Charles Sun (Justin Chien) hops on a plane from Taipei to the United States. Now that his father, a topline Triad Boss, is in a coma, Charles’ mother Eileen (Michelle Yeoh), and his goofy younger brother Bruce (Sam Song Li) are in danger. Mama Sun and Bruce are hiding out in anonymity, and Charles (whose nickname is “Chairleg” because of that time he deveined and filleted a bunch of people with one) is the right person to help them with the wave of mob-based trouble coming for them.
Here’s the problem, (other than drug gangs, smuggling gangs, and cops gangs), Charles and Bruce barely know each other. Mama Sun fled Taipei when they were little and the differences in their upbringings cause fiction. Charles is an emotionally constipated and nearly unstoppable killer who bakes delicious goodies. Bruce is an LA kid who sells party-drugs to pay for college and secretly does improv. The Brothers aren’t each other’s kind of people. Building the bond between them while they try to survive outright shenanigans and chicanery is the pulse of the show.
Chien and Li’s volatile chemistry is the catalyst for this mixture of comedy, tragedy, and mayhem. The fight scenes are explosive but so is the infighting.
Here’s the surprise, the women are the goddesses in the machine, and like any good ‘deus ex machina’ they make the action pop. The show creators and writers Byron Wu and industry veteran Brad Falchuk (alongside an all-Asian-American writers room) give Yeoh a meaty character to play with and she eats it up. Mama Sun is a master strategist, a cold-blooded Queen Pin with unbreakable nerve and a kick to match. She is also a mother, wife, daughter, and sibling who has sacrificed more than she knows to keep the family safe. Her original plan didn’t work but she won’t stop until she fixes the problem (or dies trying)
Then there’s June (Alice Hewkin), the tattoo artist who is fueled by rage and is out for revenge. Hewkin’s June is one of my two favorite characters. She is the 20-sided D&D dice you want on the board, I just wish there was more of her in S1. Xing (Jenny Yang) is a member of the Sun Family and is a Taipei baddie who gets the job done no matter what her orders are. And there’s Alexis (Highdee Kuan), the love interest for Charles but also a prosecutor chasing the career boost that a big Triad bust would bring. I’m going to call her ‘a federal agent who’s mad cause she flagrant,’ and giggle about it. Rounding out the women of The Brothers Sun is Grace (Madison Hu) a college student with a crush on Bruce that might end with her foot on his neck.
Before I close out so you can go watch, my other favorite is another Taipei gangster known as Blood Boots (Jon Xue Zhang). Boots is one of those side characters who attaches themselves to you more with every scene—a lovable killer with a fluffy outlook on life and a wardrobe that would make him the flashiest hero in the WWE.
I’ve been trying to think of an elevator pitch. Here’s what I have: The Brothers Sun is what would happen if you took Stephen Chow movies like Kung Fu Hustle, folded in John Wick, and sweetened the mix with the big Hong Kong ‘fight and fury’ movies from the ‘90s and 2000s.
