Giant Review – Prince Naseem biopic with Pierce Brosnan on hand misses the punch | the biography

THere’s a really good cast, in a movie that tells a true story: how Irish boxing coach Brendan Ingle mentored a cheeky Sheffield boy of Yemeni immigrant parents, “Prince” Naseem Hamed, taught him to stand up to racist bullies and turned him into a media-friendly world champion in the late 1990s, fostering his showman arrogance and killer fists. But after he strikes it rich, Hamed turns on Engel, putting him out of business and turning him into a combination of John Falstaff and Broadway’s Danny Rose. Pierce Brosnan plays Engel. Amir El Masry is Hamed and Toby Stevens is up-and-coming London promoter Frank Warren who has seen the gold mine discovered by Engel.

But the film frankly lacks the prince’s impressive stunts: the boxing sequences run smoothly but the important drama between them is repeatedly static and one-note. There’s no nuance, light or shadow to Hamed’s portrayal of himself, and the Egyptian super performer is never given the opportunity to show any subtlety or much that would make his character truly interesting – even though he’s clearly been training and looks very believable in the ring.

The drama is repeatedly peppered with functional, expository dialogue that’s there to tell you exactly what’s going on and what we’re supposed to think (“You started your boxing journey when you were seven years old…”). It’s the kind of dialogue that live TV executives call “dual-screening,” making sure you know what’s going on while you’re watching the movie but also checking your phone. The background music is overbearing, and at times almost deafening, especially in the scene in which Hamid is overjoyed to visit Warren at his palatial home.

Although El-Masry and Brosnan do their best, their relationship never comes alive, and the big boxing moments are often truncated anticlimacticly. More significant is certainly the moment when Ingle, who had been motivated beyond endurance by Hamed in the gym one day as a delusional “old man,” offered to get in the ring and box him. Everyone in the gym is shocked and worried. How exactly will this insanely ill-advised confrontation end? How carefully will it end? Surely the prince would kill him? Or will he pull his punches emotionally? It is not clear.

That’s not to say there aren’t some nice punches. Brosnan laughs when Engel tells a reporter what he teaches kids from his community: reject prejudice and when you meet a pedophile, “knock them in the calves.” It’s also funny when Hamed complains about the ridiculous stunts Engel makes him do in the early days: pretending to be “the monster from the Middle East.”

As for the feud, the film shows it being exacerbated by a tell-all book that Engel was supposed to have written (apparently a plot point adapted from Nick Pitt’s book “The Paddy and the Prince”) and there’s an interestingly imagined final conversation — though the emotional tribute Hamed is supposed to pay Engel after his death is only mentioned in the closing credits, and never made. Display it on screen. Some interesting material here, but the punches don’t land.

Giant was screened at the London Film Festival and is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 9 January.