🔗 Share this article

The movie features a impressive ensemble, telling the true tale of Irish boxing trainer Brendan Ingle, who guided a cheeky Sheffield teenager from Middle Eastern migrant parents. Known as “Prince” Naseem Hamed, the youngster was coached to confront racist bullies and transformed into a celebrity world champion in the late 90s. Ingle cultivated his showboating arrogance and lethal fists, but after achieving wealth, the boxer betrayed his mentor, excluding him and turning him into a blend of Falstaff and Broadway Danny Rose.

Performers and Roles

Brosnan plays Ingle; Amir El-Masry takes on the part of the prince, and Toby Stephens is the bullish promoter Warren, who saw the potential that Ingle had uncovered.

Film’s Shortcomings

However, the film frankly misses the fighter’s fancy footwork: the boxing sequences run smoothly, but the crucial drama in between is repeatedly flat and one-note. There is no subtlety or contrast in the depiction of the protagonist himself, and the actor, an otherwise excellent talent, isn’t given the opportunity to display any depth or much of what might make his character really interesting – even though he’s clearly been training and looks very plausible in the boxing arena.

Dialogue and Music Issues

The drama is repeatedly lumbered with functional, explanatory lines that tell you exactly what is happening and what we are meant to feel (“You started your career at age seven …”). It is the kind of dialogue that digital producers call “double-screen”, ensuring you know what’s unfolding while you’re watching the movie but also checking your device. Additionally, the background music is overpowering, sometimes nearly deafening, particularly in the moment where the boxer gets overexcited calling on Warren in his palatial home.

Acting and Pivotal Scenes

While the leads do their considerable utmost, their relationship never really comes to life, and the major boxing moments are often anticlimactically truncated. The most important moment is certainly when, provoked beyond endurance in the training facility one day by Hamed as a delusional “elder”, the trainer actually proposes to get in the ring and box him. All present in the gym is shocked and uneasy. How exactly is this insanely risky standoff going to play out? How precisely the outcome? Surely the champion is going to kill him? Alternatively will he sentimentally pull his punches? It’s not clear.

Bright Spots and Comedy

This isn’t to imply that there aren’t some nice jabs. The actor elicits humor when Ingle tells a journalist what he’s instructing the kids from his local community: to reject prejudice and when you encounter a paedophile, “Punch him in the bollocks”. Amusing too when the boxer fidgets at the ridiculous antics Ingle makes him do in the beginning: posing as the “beast from the East”.

Storyline and Final Thoughts

Regarding the rift, the movie shows this as being worsened by a revealing book that Ingle is allegedly authored (a story element clearly adapted from another source), and there is an interestingly conceived final conversation – however the heartfelt homage that the boxer is reportedly paid to Ingle after his death is merely mentioned in the end titles, and not dramatised on screen. There is interesting material here, but the punches don’t land.

Giant screened at the festival and is available in British and Irish theaters from 9 January.