“The Brothers Sun,” which premiered Thursday on Netflix, is a hodgepodge of a martial arts family dramedy, elevated by the presence and performance of Michelle Yeoh. And you can quote me.
We begin in Taipei, Taiwan, in a glass-walled apartment in a modern skyscraper, where handsome, fit Charles Sun (Justin Chien) is baking a cake while “The Great British Baking Show” plays on his big-screen television. A team of masked assassins bursts in. He dispatches them with furious-fisted ease, but at the cost of his cake burning. Obviously, there is more to Charles than combining the dry and wet ingredients, but food — the modern filmmaker’s shortcut to adding dimension to genre characters — will be a motif throughout.
Enter Charles’ father, Big Sun (Johnny Kou), clearly some sort of major gangster — he’s the head of the Jade Dragons Triad — who has been drawn out of hiding. Charles, something of a grim hothead when he isn’t patiently waiting for the dough to rise, suspects rival Sleepy Chan or his son Drowsy Lee of being behind the attack, though any direction a finger points in the first 10 minutes of an eight-hour story is going to be pointing in the wrong direction. Big Sun has barely warned Charles not to jump to conclusions when a bullet pierces the window and Big Sun, who collapses, pronouncing the name of Charles’ mother.
Over in Los Angeles, Bruce Sun (Sam Song Li), who was removed from Taipei as a child, is driving for Lyft — two women throw up in his car, to indicate how that’s going — and living with his (and Charles’) mother, “Mama” Eileen (Yeoh), in the San Gabriel Valley, a hub of Chinese and Taiwanese life. (There is a good deal of community specificity.) His secret ambition, a career in improv, is indicated by his “Yes and” keychain, but he’s studying to go to medical school to please Eileen. He’s an amiable goofball living in ignorance of the family business.