The first voice you hear in Taiwanese American gangster comedy-drama The Brothers Sun? Sandi Toksvig, going on about chocolate cake. In a pristine penthouse in Taipei, The Great British Bake Off is playing in the background while the apartment’s owner carefully constructs his own showstopper, delicately dipping a cocktail stick into a layer of sponge before deciding it’s not quite baked and returning it to a hot oven. At that moment, three masked assassins burst in and try to kill him. At the end of the hand-to-hand combat, they are dead and he is not but he’s still furious: they’ve distracted him for too long. The cake’s burnt!
The baker is Charles Sun (Justin Chien), the son of Taiwan’s top crime boss and a powerful mobster in his own right. When the attack turns out to be part of a wider assault on his family, Charles is tasked with protecting the forgotten wing of the clan, his mother and brother, who are living normal lives in Los Angeles. His relocation, pursued by the Suns’ vicious Taiwanese enemies, prompts an action comedy with a big Jackie Chan influence that gets a lot of juice out of variations on that opening gag: tough gangster business butting up against the mundanity of everyday life.
The other brother Sun is Bruce (Sam Song Li), a nervous, clod-hopping student who will finally please his fretful mother Eileen (Michelle Yeoh) if he completes his studies and gets a well-paid job, but who has secretly wasted his tuition money on improv classes and is driving a taxi at night to get by. When we first meet him, he is welcoming two young revellers into the back seat in what we sense is a rare encounter with the opposite sex, but before he can try any of his patter on them, they’ve thrown up on the upholstery.
Bruce is, in other words, the archetypal lovable loser from a million comedy movies, and so he must be about to receive a life-changing shock: he is confronted not just with the capable, manly older brother he hasn’t seen since childhood, but with the news that their family is involved in a business to which the cowardly Bruce could not be less suited.
Thus The Brothers Sun sets up a dynamic that more or less sustains itself for eight episodes. Charles and Bruce, on a quest to protect themselves and their mother by finding out who is out to get them, are forced to become acquainted, gradually moving towards each other having started out as polar opposites. Charles is appalled at the way his shrieking, dithering sibling keeps almost getting them killed; Bruce is aghast at having to stab people and stuff their dismembered bodies into suitcases. But Charles has a softer side, as evidenced by a love of baking that is reignited when he discovers the delights of the local churros, and Bruce has a love for his mother that makes him fierce in his own way.
The show is not afraid of the obvious gag, as demonstrated in episode one where someone taking a drag on a bong is told some startling news just as they inhale. Nor does it mind heavily contrived, groanworthy jokes, such as the finale to a sequence where a troupe of children’s entertainers in dinosaur costumes turn out to be yet more trained assassins. A visual reference to the end of Jurassic Park is hinted at, then telegraphed, then finally delivered, not unsatisfyingly.
Whether you find The Brothers Sun a binge or a bore will depend on how receptive you are to a serious subtext about family obligations, and the eternal truth that kids and parents never really know each other as well as they like to think. To really love the show, viewers would need to appreciate all that while also wanting the cheap dopamine hits of endless fight sequences, which are not distinctive but well choreographed enough, and the goofy culture-clash comedy, which is predictable but nicely performed. None of these potentially incompatible elements is done badly, but none of it feels essential or new either.
If anyone can hold a show like this together it is Yeoh, whose supreme screen presence powers the sturdiest of the running gags: helicopter moms run their households as if they’re feared crime bosses, but Eileen has the potential to become a real one. Yeoh’s ability to shift from waspish impatience to cool menace fits perfectly: that Mama Sun is as lethal with her fists as any Triad is so inevitable it barely counts as a twist, but The Brothers Sun is not bothered about surprising us if it can keep entertaining us, which it just about does.
• The Brothers Sun is on Netflix now
