🔗 Share this article

This film features a talented cast, telling the real-life tale of coach Brendan Ingle, who guided a brash Sheffield youth from Middle Eastern immigrant family. Known as Naseem Hamed, the youngster was coached to stand up to prejudice and transformed into a media-friendly titleholder in the late 90s. Ingle nurtured his showboating arrogance and lethal fists, but after becoming rich, the boxer betrayed his coach, cutting him out and turning him into a blend of Falstaff and Broadway Danny Rose.

Performers and Roles

Brosnan plays the trainer; El-Masry embodies the part of Hamed, and Toby Stephens is the bullish promoter Warren, who saw the potential that Ingle had discovered.

Film’s Shortcomings

However, the film honestly lacks the fighter’s fancy footwork: the boxing sequences flow well, but the crucial story between them is repeatedly dull and one-note. It lacks nuance or light and shade in the depiction of the protagonist himself, and El-Masry, an otherwise excellent talent, doesn’t get the opportunity to show any depth or much of what might make his character really interesting – even though he’s obviously been working out and appears convincing in the boxing arena.

Problems with Script and Sound

The story is often burdened by functional, explanatory dialogue that inform you precisely what is going on and what we are supposed to be thinking (“Your journey began your career at seven years old …”). It is the sort of script that streaming-TV executives call “double-screen”, ensuring you know what’s unfolding while you’re watching the film but also glancing at your device. Additionally, the score is overpowering, at times almost overwhelming, particularly in the moment where Hamed gets overexcited calling on Warren in his palatial home.

Acting and Pivotal Scenes

Although the leads do their very best, their dynamic doesn’t quite ignites, and the big set-piece boxing moments are frequently anticlimactically truncated. A key scene is certainly when, provoked past his limit in the gym one day by the boxer as a delusional “elder”, Ingle in fact proposes to get in the ring and fight him. Everyone in the gym is stunned and uncomfortable. How exactly is this extremely risky confrontation going to unfold? How precisely the ending? Surely the champion is going to kill him? Alternatively will he sentimentally hold back? It’s not clear.

Highlights and Humor

That’s not to say that there are no some good moments. Brosnan gets laughs when Ingle informs a journalist what he’s instructing the youths from his neighborhood: to oppose bias and when you meet a paedophile, “Hit them in the bollocks”. Amusing too when the boxer fidgets at the ridiculous stunts Ingle makes him do in the beginning: posing as the “monster from the East”.

Plot and Conclusion

Regarding the falling out, the film depicts this as being exacerbated by a revealing book that the trainer is allegedly written (a plot point clearly adapted from another source), and there is an interestingly conceived last discussion – although the heartfelt homage that Hamed is supposed to have given to Ingle after his death is merely referenced in the closing credits, and not shown on screen. Some engaging content in this film, but the blows don’t land.

Giant screened at the London film festival and is in British and Irish cinemas from January 9.