There’s a really good cast here, in a movie with a real-life story to tell: how Irish boxing trainer Brendan Ingle mentored a cheeky Sheffield kid from migrant Yemeni parents, “Prince” Naseem Hamed, teaching him to stand up to racist bullies and turning him into a media-friendly world champ in the late 90s, nurturing his showboating arrogance and his lethal fists. But, after becoming wealthy, Hamed brattishly turned against Ingle, cutting him out of the action, and turning him into a combination of John Falstaff and Broadway Danny Rose. Pierce Brosnan plays Ingle; Amir El-Masry is Hamed and Toby Stephens is bullish London promoter Frank Warren who saw the goldmine that Ingle had discovered.
But the movie frankly lacks the Prince’s fancy footwork: the boxing sequences run smoothly but the all-important drama between them is repeatedly flat and one-note. There is no nuance or light and shade in the depiction of Hamed himself, and that otherwise outstanding performer El-Masry isn’t given the chance to show any subtlety or much of what might make his character really interesting – although he’s clearly been training and looks very plausible in the ring.
The drama is repeatedly lumbered with functional, expositional dialogue which is there to tell you exactly what is going on and what we are supposed to be thinking (“You started your boxing journey at seven years old …”). It is the kind of dialogue that streaming-TV executives call “double-screen”, making sure you know what’s going on while you’re watching the film but also checking your phone. And the background music is overbearing, sometimes almost deafening, particularly in the scene in which Hamed gets overexcited at visiting Warren in his palatial home.
Although El-Masry and Brosnan do their considerable best, their relationship never really comes to life, and the big set-piece boxing moments are often anticlimactically truncated. The most important is surely the moment when, goaded beyond endurance in the gym one day by Hamed as a delusional “old man”, Ingle actually offers to get in the ring and box him. Everyone in the gym is shocked and uneasy. How exactly is this insanely unwise standoff going to play out? How precisely is it going to end? Surely the Prince is going to kill him? Or will he sentimentally pull his punches? It’s not clear.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some nice jabs. Brosnan gets laughs when Ingle tells a reporter what he’s teaching the kids from his local community: to reject prejudice and when you encounter a paedophile, “Punch him in the bollocks”. It’s funny too when Hamed squirms at the silly stunts Ingle makes him do in the early days: posing as the “beast from the Middle East”.
As for the falling out, the film shows this as being worsened by a tell-all book that Ingle is supposed to have written (a plot point evidently modified from Nick Pitt’s book The Paddy and the Prince) and there is an interestingly imagined final conversation – although the emotional tribute that Hamed is supposed to have paid to Ingle after his death is merely mentioned in the closing credits, and not dramatised on screen. Some interesting material here, but the punches don’t land.
Giant screened at the London film festival and is in UK and Irish cinemas from 9 January.
