The opening Raging Bull homage, complete with black-and-white filming and slow-motion boxing sequence, is certainly bold. And the executive producer credit for Sylvester Stallone, under his Balboa Productions banner, suggests a close thematic cousin of the Rocky franchise. Yet despite all this, and contrary to the film’s own pulse-quickening marketing campaign, this is not a boxing movie, nor even a biopic about the flamboyant featherweight Prince Naseem Hamed, here played by Amir El-Masry (Thomas Wyatt from Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light).

It is instead an often thoughtful melodrama about the surrogate father-son relationship that apparently developed between Hamed and his Irish trainer, Brendan Ingle, from their first encounter in Sheffield in 1981 to Hamed’s high-profile World Boxing Organization championship fight in Madison Square Garden, New York, in 1997. Ingle is played by Pierce Brosnan in another of those unexpected and attention-grabbing character turns that have arrived fortuitously in the former Bond actor’s seventies (see also MobLand, Black Bag and The Thursday Murder Club). As Ingle, Brosnan is wearing a latex skullcap to approximate thinning hair and a fake bent nose and sports a thick Dublin accent which only occasionally wobbles into Cockney.

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The success of his performance is demonstrable in how infuriating he becomes. The writer-director Rowan Athale’s screenplay depicts him as a garrulous braggart who hides his sensitivity and self-doubt beneath cringeworthy reminiscences about his fighting days, and his belief that he’s the miraculous engine behind the startling success of “the Naz fella’, as he gratingly refers to Hamed.

In one deliciously awkward scene, when criticised for hijacking a Hamed interview with more war stories, Ingle blurts out, “Naz’s journey and mine are intertwined!” Nobody listens, but he’s actually articulating the emotional backbone of the film: Ingle’s deluded idea that Hamed, amid the multimillion-pound successes of his adult boxing career, would think only about how well and how handsomely he could remunerate his childhood trainer.

“Sharpen a knife and it will cut you too,” warns Ingle’s wife, Alma (Katherine Dow Blyton), who is given the film’s best lines and watches hopelessly as Hamed’s fame begets a swelling backroom “team” that inevitably ostracises her gauche, loud-mouthed husband.

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There’s a smart monologue midway too from Toby Stephens as Frank Warren, about the early-Nineties makeover of the British boxing world and how it rebranded the sport as a men’s magazine fantasy for newer, wealthier audiences, not just “old blokes in shit suits”.

It doesn’t all work. The boxing scenes are undercooked and the ending is rushed and ineffective. But there’s a gripping sadness here that lingers.
★★★☆☆
15, 110min
In cinemas

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