Promotional poster for the series "The Sun Brothers" (Al Jazeera)

Actress Michelle Yeoh won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in 2023, becoming the first Asian actress to win this award, and the first Malaysian to win an Oscar in any category. This award rediscovered the actress who may not have been known before by a wide segment of the public, and in 2024 she moved to Yeoh moved from the cinema to the Netflix screen, presenting the American series “The Brothers Sun”.

The series “The Sun Brothers” consists of 8 episodes, and belongs to the “action” comedy genre. It was written for the screen by “Byron Wu” and “Brad Falchuk”, and co-stars “Michel Yeoh” with “Justin Chen” and “Sam Sung Lee”.

Series seen before

The series “The Sun Brothers” gives the impression of “seen before” or “déjà vu” from its beginning. The plot and character building in particular seem as if they are illegitimate children of dozens of series and films, whether action comedies in general, or Asian action comedies in particular.

It begins with the opening scene, in which we see the series' hero, "Charles/Justin Chen", in the kitchen of his spacious home, preparing a cake with great perfection, and in the background a giant television screen on which a famous cooking program is shown. This silence quickly turns into loud chaos when "Charles" attacks a group. From the gangsters, but the calm chef turns into a hurricane who masters the art of Asian fighting, and he kills them one by one, before returning to his cake and finding it burned, which angers him perhaps more than the attack itself.

Dozens of directors have used the scene of the hero practicing his calm daily habits before being attacked, and displaying his fighting abilities in many actions that are difficult to even enumerate. It is a traditional means of expressing the contradictory aspects of the character’s life, and it is supposed to surprise the viewer, which was not achieved here. Because with the frequent use of this method, it has become a repeated “cliché” in itself.

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In the immediate next scene, we get to know Charles's father, who is one of the three heads of Chinese gangs, who is competing with the other two heads to rule the Asian criminal world. The attack targeting the father is repeated this time, and just before he enters a coma, he asks his son to protect his mother.

"Charles" leaves the war that he intended to wage against the heads of rival gangs, and moves from "Taiwan" to "Los Angeles" in America, so that the viewer learns that his mother and younger brother live a quiet "civilian" life away from the violence of organized crime, and under the cover of her work as a nurse who raises... Mother “Eileen/Michelle Yeoh” and youngest son “Bruce/Sam Sung Lee”.

Another repetition we find in the two brothers who were raised in isolation from each other, then they discover each other’s need for the other, and the extent of the contradiction between them at the same time. It is a dramatic tool that has been used many times before, the most famous of which is the award-winning film “Rain Man.” .

While Michelle Yeoh presented herself as the mother figure in her most famous film, “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” for which she won an Oscar, she is the woman who from the outside appears to be an ordinary Asian woman, with her strictness and strictness in her... Applying the rules and raising her children, feeding them with the original recipes she learned from her grandmother, but she is able to fight with extreme ferocity to protect her children.

The similarities with other works extend to the rest of the details of the series, such as: the eldest son’s complete submission to his family, and the younger son’s rebellion in learning “improvisational” acting, contrary to the mother’s wishes. We find that the episodes only present one expected scene after another without any attempt to break the horizon of the viewer’s expectations. Or surprise him.

Jackie Chan syndrome

The global success of Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan has contributed to a phenomenon that can be called "Jackie Chan Syndrome", represented by dozens of films that attempt to copy his style of mixing comedy and Asian action in particular, where the hero combines wit and the ability to perform Asian martial arts movements. Quickly and accurately.

The phenomenon of "Jackie Chan Syndrome", where the hero combines wit and the ability to perform Asian martial arts (social networking sites)

The series “The Sun Brothers” is the latest victim of this syndrome, and its makers have tried all the time to mix action scenes with comedy. This is mainly centered on brother “Charles” - who presented most of the action scenes in the series in general - so his character was drawn, who enjoys killing to the same degree while... Her enjoyment of cooking, just as he passionately pursues the search for the enemy targeting his family, tries to cook one of the types of sweets that he recently learned in the United States, with hints to his past as an obese teenager for his love of food.

Although actress Michelle Yeoh is famous for her distinguished performance in action scenes - especially in her Asian films that made her name before the Oscars and became known to the American public - the makers of the series almost deprived her of these scenes, except in the last episodes when she presented one of the best action sequences in the series. The series.

In an interview with the series' author, Brandon Rowe, with the Variety website, he justified this absence by his desire, along with the rest of the makers of "The Sun Brothers," to focus on the motherly side of the character "Ellen" so that Americans of Asian descent would identify with her, and feel that they were watching their mothers on screen, and not an actress. The famous action star plays the role of a mother.

Which suggests that the series is basically directed only to satisfy this segment of viewers, using very familiar scenes and “action techniques” through “Charles”, and deprives the work of seeing what is new to many spectators, that is, “Michelle Yeoh” as she presents what she excelled at. In it for decades in her early films.

The action technique itself, the way it was filmed, or the choice of locations where the fighting takes place, did not bring anything new or different from the repetitive and usual scenes in dozens of series and films that present Asian action, and it did not even outperform the old “Jackie Chan” films despite the difference in time and the techniques used recently. .

The series “The Sun Brothers” is a work that exploited its star’s fame to market itself, but it was unable to exploit her true skills and potential, whether as an action star or an actress, and it quoted a lot from other works until it blurred its features, so it no longer had a different taste for its fans to remember after it ended.

Source: Al Jazeera