The Big Picture

Michelle Yeoh elevates Netflix’s The Brothers Sun with her compelling on-screen presence, even in a series that struggles to find its tone. The series starts as a lighthearted action-comedy but takes shaky dramatic steps as it progresses. While the rest of the cast is engaging, Yeoh remains the grounding force and delivers powerful performances once again.

Michelle Yeoh can make just about everything great. While many will have been made recently aware of this with last year’s dynamic character study of a film that disguised itself as a multiverse movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is so much more her filmography has to offer beyond that. While the award-winning film was a great showcase for her that truly lived up to its name, earlier works like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and beyond provide just as much proof of how she is one of the most compelling screen presences in cinema history. Throughout a career that has spanned decades, Yeoh has created a body of work beyond compare. Whenever she’s in something, even when it’s not quite up to her caliber, she elevates it all just by being there.

The Brothers Sun Follows Charles Sun, a Taipei gangster who’s settled into his life as a ruthless killer, but must go to L.A. to protect his mother and younger brother after his father was shot by a mysterious assassin. Release Date January 4, 2024 Creator Byron Wu, Brad Falchuk Cast Michelle Yeoh , Justin Chien , Sam Song Li , Highdee Kuan , Joon Lee , Jon Xue Zhang Genres Action , Comedy , Drama Seasons 1

The new series The Brothers Sun, now streaming on Netflix, is something that puts this to the test. A mixed bag of a show that begins as more of an action-comedy before taking increasingly shaky dramatic steps, it manages to mostly stay on its feet due to the presence of those like Yeoh, who remain committed to giving each escalation a sturdier foundation. It’s unfortunate that the series frequently undercuts itself, often floundering around for a tone with a general lack of confidence in the closing part of its eight-episode season. However, Yeoh is endlessly compelling every time she is on-screen, proving once again that she is one of the greats. It’s a shame there isn’t more of her, but what we do get is still just enough for her to kick the series up a notch at key moments. While The Brothers Sun doesn’t all come together as well as one would hope, Yeoh never takes a wrong step.

What Is ‘The Brothers Sun’ About?

The Brothers Sun kicks off with an intro that provides one of the season’s better action sequences, which is only occasionally matched later on. We first meet the suave gangster Charles Sun (Justin Chien) not while he’s busting heads, but preparing a delightful meal in a luxurious apartment in Taipei. Unfortunately, when some masked attackers come knocking, he has to take them all out and his baking skills go to waste when his cake burns. When his father, Big Sun (Johnny Kou), comes out of hiding to see what happened, this attack is revealed to be a means of luring him out for an attempt on his life. With the patriarch of this crime family in a coma, Charles heads to L.A. to ensure his remaining family doesn’t face a similar attack alone. Little does he know that Eileen “Mama” Sun (Yeoh) has built an entire life for herself and her son Bruce (Sam Song Li) away from all this danger. She mostly just wants him to go to school while he aspires to do improv comedy. Of course, this otherwise quiet life gets disrupted as danger follows Charles there and the entire family will have to find a way to survive a potential gang war.

The Brothers Sun, while plenty violent with stabbing, shooting, and bone-crunching fights, initially remains light on its feet. When Bruce and Charles first meet each other, they have to navigate various challenges that are generally silly. This includes everything from identifying the severed head of a man who attacked the small home to fighting off knife-wielding goons in inflatable dinosaur costumes to infiltrating a kid’s birthday party to get information. These can be good fun in terms of how they’re choreographed, but there is still a sense that Yeoh is oddly sidelined. While The Brothers Sun is increasingly an ensemble series, there are many times when you can feel how she was possibly only there to shoot a couple of interior scenes when everyone else is getting up to more excitement. Some of this is the point, as Mama’s cover story involves the creation of this unassuming identity for herself to avoid attracting attention, but the series is at its best when Yeoh gets to do her own action.

A couple of early scenes let Yeoh take more of a leading role, with a mahjong montage proving to be more kinetic than some of the latter fight scenes, but they can often get lost in the tedious machinations of the rest of the show. There are plenty of jokes about improv, too, which can grow quite tiring, but the charming cast makes them easier to absorb. Yet, the more that The Brothers Sun begins moving forward into conflict, the more you just wish it would play around with simpler scenes. For every more inventive fight that makes great use of a drone, some elements start to become more serious in a way that the show doesn’t quite have a handle on. One scene involving a rather major character’s execution clashes with a funny escape method, but this plays less as earned dark humor and more as tonal whiplash. Even when characters essentially rise from the grave — in more ways than one — the most life the show has is when we get to be with Yeoh.

‘The Brothers Sun’ Could’ve Used More Michelle Yeoh

There are plenty of “twists,” but there’s far more value in just letting Yeoh cook. Whenever she does, we feel so much more emotion — whether she’s delivering a withering retort in the face of danger or finally leaping into a fight sequence of her own. The rest of the show’s characters, whose number grows increasingly over the series to diminishing returns, are just never as engaging as she is. Even as the cast are often literally throwing themselves into the experience, Yeoh remains the grounding force of it all. The Brothers Sun is the type of series that feels like it has room to grow, as it leaves the door open for more, but it would also do well to recognize its greatest strengths in future seasons.

Rating: 6/10

The Brothers Sun is now available to stream on Netflix in the U.S.

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