(courtesy First Showing)
You have to love any series that uses the energetic musical idiosyncrasy of Belgian popster Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça plane pour moi” to soundtrack a montage of two long estranged brothers bonding in L.A. at the supposed multi-million dollar vacation home of actor John Cho.
You have to hand it even more plaudits for miraculously managing to deftly and artfully balance near-balletic martial arts fight scenes, comedic repartee worthy of a classic sitcom at its height and some heart-searingly serious moments that cut to the very heart of familial obligation, personal freedom and whether destiny is preordained or open to some of malleable change?
That’s a huge amount of, well, everything to pack into one eight-episode streaming series, but The Brothers Sun, created by Byron Wu & Brad Falchuk, manages it with such a ridiculous amount of hugely entertaining aplomb that you marvel at how anyone could say so much in approximately eight hours of television and still produce a show that feels effortlessly flawless in every regard.
A world of opposites writ large against the backdrop of L.A., and occasionally Taipei, The Brothers Sun centres on, you guessed it, two brothers, one of whom, Charles (Justin Chien) has been raised as the violence-prone heir apparent to the Jade Dragons triad while the other, Bruce (Sam Song), is a medical student blissfully unaware that his family has any connection to organised crime at all.
His mother Eileen, played with engaging chutzpah by the always superb Michelle Yeoh, works as a nurse and as far as Bruce knows, limits her world to looking after him and ensuring he doesn’t miss a day of medical college and going to play mahjong with the Aunties for whom Bruce is a cherubic delight.
The idea of her being anything even approaching a lynchpin of the Taiwanese triads hasn’t even crossed his mind; why would it? He has only known a sheltered life in L.A. and has no reason to think that his mother is, in fact, married to the most powerful triad “ghost” in her home country.
So, you can imagine his shock when he discovers that everything he thought he knew about his family is wrong. Very, very wrong.
———- SPOILERS AHEAD ———- Precipitated by the shooting of his father Big Sun in Taiwan (Johnny Ku), which places him in a coma and makes Charles the putative head of the crime family, the events of The Brothers Sun quickly throw Bruce into the deep end of intricate backend plotting, murderous massacres and revelation after revelation about his mother, brother and family overall, the kind that trigger everything from disbelieving oneliners delivered at oddly inappropriate times to the sheer terror of facing death when all you thought you had on your slate were lectures and exams.
Somehow, The Brothers Sun manages to be both revelatorily intense to such a degree that you wonder how Bruce’s head doesn’t explode – to be fair, with some of the dubious decisions he makes under pressure, it’s highly likely that that’s precisely what is happening – and yet tenderly intimate, leveraging tons of comedy out of the fish out of water scenario while making it very clear that there’s a huge amount at stake and that Bruce doesn’t know how to deal with the ramifications of that much of the time.
What makes The Brothers Sun fresh and interesting is the fact that it doesn’t go the typical route of turning a naïve soul into a seasoned vet in no time flat.
Sure, Bruce wises up pretty quickly to what’s going on (mosty), and he’s bright enough and sufficiently savvy to think outside the box – mainly because he was never in the triad box to begin with so isn’t encumbered by traditional thinking and sclerotic convention – and he does pull off some limited-use wins, but he always sweet and goodhearted enough that he doesn’t want to join the world of his parents and brother completely.
He remains the moral compass at the heart of the show throughout, and while Charles is revealed as a baker wannabe and soft soul who abhors the killing machine he has been forced by necessity to become, it’s Bruce who urges his mother and brother to fight against what they see as all but inevitable and to strike back against the world as they know it.
His suggestions don’t always hold water, nor do they go the distance, and to be fair, this is a show that acknowledges that what you want isn’t always what you get when honour and long-entrenched convention are the orders of the day, but the fact that he is there urging people to try and fight the system, and that that aspect of him is preserved from start to finish, goes against the usual Chosen One narrative which all but wipes out the innate goodness and innocence of the hero of the story in the service of ceaseless and irrevocable path to destiny.
It’s a gutsy move on behalf of The Brothers Sun but it reflects the fact that we don’t always get what we want and that while there is a liberating joie de vivre to giving the finger to convention, that sometimes that isn’t possible, and that you have to take as close as you can get.
That’s the great moralistic drama at the heart of the story which sagely observes that while Charles in particular wants to be break free of his all but pre-ordained role as assassin and heir to the kingpin of violent organised crime, he is always woven into a societal contract that doesn’t brook free thinkers running amuck.
The show isn’t necessarily critical of these obligations and makes jokes about the cult of individualism at the heart of American society and acknowledges that while Charles might wonder what it would be like to marry, settle down, bake and let suburban life set the uneventful tone of his life, he can’t simply dismantle a system of mutually obligatory checks-and-balances and nor necessarily should he.
The Brothers Sun also has some thoughtful fun with the grey lines we draw for ourselves morally.
While the lives Charles, Eileen and Big Sun have led are by every well-set good versus evil matrix on the dark side of humanity part of the spectrum, Charles’ childhood friend, Alexis Kong (Highdee Kuan), a ruthlessly ambitious assistant district attorney on the rise, is not exactly squeaky clean as she stops at nothing, on the supposed right side of the law, to get what she wants.
The same applies to the mysterious enemy attacking all the triads, who hail themselves as being in the right side of morality and history and claim moral virtue and yet who perpetrate the same mindless violence and terror as those they claim to righteously oppose.
There’s a lot of moralistic reasoning and familial drama of the most emotionally thoughtful and affecting kind at play but somehow for all that deadly seriousness, The Brothers Sun also manages to be ridiculously light and funny, much of the time courtesy of Bruce and his assaulted innocence and disbelief that anyone, especially his family, could be involved in something so heinous as organised crime.
It helps that in a show with immaculately complete and wondrously immersive worldbuilding that carries some heavily moralistic and emotional weight on its shoulders that the humour is allowed to shine through, sometimes in the midst of intense action or moving drama, and that it bolsters the appeal of The Brothers Sun rather than ever detracts from it.
It is, in many ways, the perfect package, with The Brothers Sun leaving you gasping at the fight scenes, moved by the naked emotionalism at display and laughing uproariously at the quips and oneliners that fly almost as far as the bullets, fists and knives, and buoyed by the fact that more storytelling in this violently intimate and comedically rich world awaits, and hopefully not too far away either. (Make sure you don’t fast forward through the credits at the end of the final episode.)
The Brothers Sun is streaming on Netflix.