Here is a perfectly respectable – if ragged at the edges – attempt to engage with a sporting story that wove triumph and pride in with regret and disharmony.
The title is deliberately ambiguous. Prince Naseem Hamed, multiple featherweight world champion, is surely a legend among British boxers. Few others had quite his arrogant panache. But, as the film draws to a sombre close, the real hero emerges as his dogged coach Brendan Ingle. Born in Dublin, the great man died as a Sheffield legend with an MBE to his name.
The film hangs on duelling performances from Pierce Brosnan, as Ingle, and Amir El-Masry, as Hamed. (Ali Saleh and Ghaith Saleh play the fighter at different stages of childhood.) Ingle emerges as a pugilistic second father to the tougher kids of South Yorkshire, channelling aggressive instincts into more structured violence.
Early on, Rowan Athale’s script gets at an eventual conflict in Hamed’s professional life. The flamboyant grandstanding is his selling point, but it will ultimately make him enemies.
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There is something of Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose in Brosnan’s version of Ingle. Like the talent agent in that film, he has a habit of taking clients to the foothills before losing them to flashier, wealthier operators. He progresses much further than that with Hamed, but we sense that a break will eventually come.
El-Masry, so good in Ben Sharrock’s Limbo, has bulked up impressively to get as close as a mere actor could get to Naseem’s taut, tense torso. He does better still in marshalling Hamed’s sub-hip-hop banter. Brosnan is, well, Brosnan: charming, sweet, crafty, never fully in control of an accent that veers from deepest Dublin all the way across the Irish Sea in the space of a single clause.
One can’t help thinking of a similarly complementary relationship in the recent Saipan. Giant, however, is clunkier in its plotting and more at home to drearily expository dialogue. We are forever having the jeopardy explained. We are forever having racial tensions clarified. In one unintentionally hilarious sequence, Toby Stephens, as the legendary promoter Frank Warren, pauses to explain the cultural meaning of 1990s lad culture to those who didn’t live through it.
Still, the core (largely true) story is just about strong enough to keep the film on its feet through all 12 rounds. A narrow victory on points.
In cinemas from Friday, January 9th
