🔗 Share this article

The movie features a talented ensemble, telling the real-life tale of Irish boxing trainer Ingle, who mentored a brash Sheffield teenager from Yemeni migrant parents. Known as “Prince” Naseem Hamed, the fighter was taught to stand up to prejudice and molded into a celebrity titleholder in the late 90s. The trainer cultivated his flamboyant arrogance and powerful punches, but after becoming rich, Hamed turned against his mentor, cutting him out and turning him into a mix of John Falstaff and Broadway Danny Rose.

Performers and Roles

Pierce Brosnan plays the trainer; Amir El-Masry takes on the role of the prince, and Stephens appears as the assertive London promoter Frank Warren, who saw the goldmine that Ingle had discovered.

Film’s Shortcomings

However, the movie honestly lacks the fighter’s agility: the fight scenes flow well, but the all-important drama between them is consistently dull and monotonous. It lacks subtlety or contrast in the depiction of the protagonist himself, and El-Masry, an otherwise excellent talent, doesn’t get the opportunity to display any subtlety or much of what might make his role really interesting – although he’s clearly been training and appears convincing in the ring.

Dialogue and Music Issues

The story is often lumbered with utilitarian, expositional dialogue that tell you precisely what is happening and what we are meant to feel (“You started your career at age seven …”). This is the sort of dialogue that digital producers call “double-screen”, ensuring you know what’s unfolding while you’re watching the film but also glancing at your device. Additionally, the background music is overbearing, at times almost deafening, particularly in the scene where Hamed gets overexcited visiting the promoter in his palatial residence.

Performances and Key Moments

While the leads do their very best, their dynamic never really comes to life, and the big set-piece boxing moments are often anticlimactically cut short. The most important moment is certainly when, goaded beyond endurance in the training facility one day by Hamed as a misguided “old man”, Ingle actually proposes to get in the ring and fight him. Everyone in the room is shocked and uncomfortable. In what way is this insanely unwise confrontation going to unfold? How precisely the outcome? Certainly the Prince is going to defeat him? Alternatively will he sentimentally pull his punches? The resolution remains ambiguous.

Bright Spots and Comedy

That’s not to say that there are no some good moments. Brosnan elicits humor when his character informs a reporter what he’s instructing the youths from his neighborhood: to reject prejudice and when you meet a paedophile, “Punch him in the groin”. Amusing too when Hamed squirms at the ridiculous stunts the coach makes him do in the early days: acting like the “beast from the Middle East”.

Storyline and Final Thoughts

As for the rift, the movie shows this as being worsened by a tell-all publication that Ingle is allegedly authored (a plot point evidently modified from another source), and there is an interestingly imagined final conversation – although the emotional tribute that Hamed is supposed to have paid to his mentor after his passing is merely mentioned in the end titles, and not dramatised on film. Some interesting material here, but the punches don’t land.

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