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This film boasts a talented cast, telling the true tale of Irish boxing trainer Brendan Ingle, who guided a brash Yorkshire youth from Middle Eastern immigrant family. Known as Naseem Hamed, the fighter was coached to stand up to racist bullies and transformed into a celebrity world champion in the 1990s. Ingle cultivated his showboating arrogance and lethal fists, but after becoming rich, the boxer turned against his coach, cutting him out and making him a mix of Falstaff and Broadway Danny Rose.

Cast and Characters

Brosnan plays Ingle; Amir El-Masry embodies the role of the prince, and Toby Stephens appears as the bullish promoter Frank Warren, who recognized the goldmine that the coach had uncovered.

Where the Movie Falls Short

Yet, the film honestly misses the Prince’s fancy footwork: the fight scenes flow well, but the crucial story between them is consistently dull and one-note. It lacks nuance or light and shade in the depiction of Hamed himself, and the actor, an otherwise excellent talent, doesn’t get the chance to display any subtlety or much of what might make his character truly engaging – although he’s obviously been training and appears convincing in the ring.

Problems with Script and Sound

The story is often lumbered with functional, explanatory dialogue that inform you precisely what is going on and what we are meant to feel (“You started your career at seven years old …”). This is the sort of script that streaming-TV producers call “second-screen”, making sure you know what’s unfolding while you’re viewing the film but also glancing at your phone. And, the score is overbearing, at times nearly deafening, particularly in the moment where the boxer gets too excited visiting the promoter in his palatial residence.

Acting and Pivotal Scenes

Although the leads do their considerable utmost, their dynamic doesn’t quite comes to life, and the big set-piece fight scenes are often disappointingly truncated. A key moment is certainly when, provoked beyond endurance in the training facility one day by the boxer as a misguided “old man”, Ingle in fact offers to step into the ring and fight him. Everyone in the gym is stunned and uneasy. How exactly is this insanely unwise confrontation going to play out? How precisely the ending? Certainly the Prince is going to defeat him? Or will he emotionally pull his punches? The resolution remains ambiguous.

Highlights and Humor

This isn’t to imply that there are no some nice jabs. The actor elicits humor when his character tells a journalist what he’s instructing the kids from his local community: to reject prejudice and when you encounter a offender, “Punch him in the bollocks”. Amusing too when Hamed squirms at the ridiculous antics Ingle makes him do in the beginning: acting like the “monster from the Middle East”.

Plot and Conclusion

Regarding the falling out, the movie depicts this as being exacerbated by a tell-all book that the trainer is allegedly written (a story element clearly adapted from another source), and there is an intriguingly imagined final conversation – although the heartfelt homage that the boxer is supposed to have given to his mentor after his death is only referenced in the closing credits, and not dramatised on screen. Some interesting material here, but the punches don’t land.

The film was shown at the London film festival and is in British and Irish cinemas from January 9.