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This film boasts a talented ensemble, depicting the real-life tale of coach Ingle, who mentored a brash Yorkshire teenager from Middle Eastern immigrant parents. Known as Naseem Hamed, the youngster was taught to stand up to prejudice and transformed into a media-friendly world champion in the 1990s. The trainer nurtured his showboating arrogance and lethal fists, but after becoming rich, the boxer turned against his mentor, excluding him and turning him into a mix of Falstaff and Broadway Danny Rose.

Performers and Roles

Pierce Brosnan portrays the trainer; Amir El-Masry takes on the role of the prince, and Toby Stephens appears as the bullish promoter Warren, who recognized the potential that Ingle had discovered.

Where the Movie Falls Short

However, the film honestly lacks the Prince’s fancy footwork: the fight scenes run smoothly, but the all-important drama between them is repeatedly flat and monotonous. It lacks nuance or contrast in the depiction of the protagonist himself, and the actor, 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 clearly been training and appears convincing in the ring.

Problems with Script and Sound

The story is repeatedly lumbered with functional, explanatory lines that tell you exactly what is happening and what we are meant to feel (“Your journey began your boxing journey at age seven …”). This is the sort of dialogue that digital executives call “second-screen”, making sure you know what’s going on while you’re watching the movie but also glancing at your phone. And, the score is overbearing, sometimes almost deafening, particularly in the scene where Hamed gets too excited visiting Warren in his luxurious home.

Acting and Pivotal Scenes

Although El-Masry and Brosnan do their very utmost, their relationship never really ignites, and the big set-piece fight scenes are often anticlimactically truncated. The most important scene is certainly when, provoked beyond endurance in the gym one day by the boxer as a delusional “old man”, the trainer in fact offers to get in the ring and fight him. All present in the gym is shocked and uneasy. In what way is this extremely risky standoff going to unfold? How precisely the outcome? Certainly the Prince is going to defeat him? Alternatively will he sentimentally hold back? The resolution remains ambiguous.

Bright Spots and Comedy

This isn’t to imply that there are no some nice jabs. Brosnan elicits humor when his character informs a journalist what he’s instructing the kids from his local community: to oppose prejudice and when you meet a paedophile, “Hit them in the bollocks”. It’s funny too when Hamed squirms at the silly antics Ingle makes him do in the early days: acting like the “beast from the East”.

Plot and Conclusion

As for the rift, the movie depicts this as being exacerbated by a revealing publication that Ingle is supposed to have written (a story element clearly modified from prior material), and there is an interestingly conceived last discussion – although the heartfelt homage that Hamed is supposed to have given to Ingle after his passing is merely mentioned in the end titles, and not dramatised on film. Some interesting material in this film, but the punches fail to connect.

The film screened at the festival and is available in British and Irish cinemas from January 9.