CinemaSerf

0/10

Three lads had a go at playing Naseem Hamed in this drama, and for me it was the twelve year old version (Ali Saleh) who just pipped his seven year old version (Ghaith Saleh) to the title of best of the three. That meant that the adult version, Amir El-Masry didn’t really shine for me as this hugely charismatic man. And charismatic he certainly is - I had lunch with him and Frank Warren in Knightsbridge once and it was great fun! Anyway, I name-drop. The Hamed family were growing up in a Sheffield that wasn’t the easiest place for people of colour and their shopkeeping mother was aware that Brendan Ingle (Pierce Brosnan) ran a boxing gym nearby. She convinces him to let them learn a little bit of self defence, and in return for some shockingly tone-deaf singing he agrees. The youngest, Naseem, isn’t daft enough to sing though - he just demonstrates the kind of footwork hitherto reserved for Michael Jackson and his trainer thinks he spots something special. Weighing in at just over seven stones, he gets his first fight and this follows his subsequent career through to his meeting with legendary promoter Warren (Toby Stephens) and then onto the “Garden” before the wheels began to come of the Ingle/Hamed wagon. Now the fact that both of Ingle’s sons and Naz himself have been engaged in the publicity for this film suggests that there is a bit of truth to this turn of events, but I just couldn’t take to El-Masry’s characterisation. The kids oozed a confidence and brass-neck that I found really quite engagingly plausible and cheeky. By the time we get to adulthood, too much of the story has been skipped and though there is some well-shot fight footage I just felt he didn’t exude the supreme arrogance of a man who knew how to goad, to provoke and to entertain. Brosnan does a little better at portraying a man who saw boxing as an apprenticeship for life outside and not just inside the ring, and he gels well with the younger Naseem’s, but again the story of their parting is too hastily arrived at and so I never felt that there was much substance to the almost paternal relationship between himself and El-Masry’ persona. It also misses out on explaining to any in the audience who don’t know who he is, just how much of an household name Hamed became. Of how much of a role model he became for working class kids up and down the UK and just how his flamboyance broke a mould in British boxing that took it into the realms of multi-million dollar light-entertainment. It is worth a watch, but I found it all just a little too superficial.