SAVIOURS

Directed by Ross Whitaker and Liam Nolan PG cert, lim release, 80 min

THIS NIMBLE, quick-footed film from Ross Whitaker and Liam Nolan - industrious rookies with no apparent fear of failure - will probably be filed away in the drawer marked "boxing documentaries". That's fair enough. The picture does, it is true, concern itself with three fighters at the admirable St Saviour's Olympic Boxing Academy in north Dublin. But Savioursis more valuable as a snapshot of Dorset Street and surroundings in the opening years of the 21st century.

Viewed from some angles, that part of Dublin appears to have changed little since the 1970s. Nolan and Whitaker offer us a fastidiously maintained but unglamorous gym run by intelligent men with grey hair and vast hearts.

Pat and John McCormack, the club's coaches, are aware that they offer kids a diversion from the deadly temptations of city life, but, never sanctimonious, they remain focused on the skills and strategies their charges require. "He's throwing the left hand too far," one remarks sagely during a fight. "He needs to shorten that left."

Unlike predecessors in earlier decades, these coaches do not have to worry overmuch about their charges emigrating (or, at least, not when the movie was made two years ago). Indeed, they now have a healthy pool of recent arrivals from which to extract next year's champ.

Dean Murphy, a dry-witted, thoughtful fellow, is the only one of the three subjects to have grown up in the area. The trio is completed by Abdul Hussain, a refugee from Ghana, and - nice timing, this - the endlessly charismatic Darren Sutherland, who recently won a bronze medal at the Olympics. On this evidence, Darren has enough charm to succeed on television if the sporting career stalls.

The film-makers appear to have made a conscious decision to limit the number and the duration of the boxing sequences. This is, in some ways, a shame. Saviours, a skilfully edited piece of verité with no voice- over and few captions, is certainly more concerned with character than conflict, but the viewer does yearn for the punctuation and pay-off that a good scrap often provides.

Never mind. The subjects' stories are sufficiently engaging to make up for the lack of wallop. Nolan and Whitaker look like serious contenders.