Starring Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Michelle Yeoh as a gangster matriarch, Netflix’s The Brothers Sun brings both serious fights and serious laughs.
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.
