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\u2019s 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). <\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s seventies (see also MobLand, Black Bag and The Thursday Murder Club<\/a>). 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.<\/p>\n \u2022 Pierce Brosnan interview: \u2018Where would James Bond spend Christmas? I don\u2019t care!\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n The success of his performance is demonstrable in how infuriating he becomes. The writer-director Rowan Athale\u2019s 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\u2019s the miraculous engine behind the startling success of \u201cthe Naz fella\u2019, as he gratingly refers to Hamed. <\/p>\n In one deliciously awkward scene, when criticised for hijacking a Hamed interview with more war stories, Ingle blurts out, \u201cNaz\u2019s journey and mine are intertwined!\u201d Nobody listens, but he\u2019s actually articulating the emotional backbone of the film: Ingle\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n \u201cSharpen a knife and it will cut you too,\u201d warns Ingle\u2019s wife, Alma (Katherine Dow Blyton), who is given the film\u2019s best lines and watches hopelessly as Hamed\u2019s fame begets a swelling backroom \u201cteam\u201d that inevitably ostracises her gauche, loud-mouthed husband.<\/p>\n