The true story of boxer Prince Naseem Hamed (Amir El-Masry), trained from a young age by Brendan Ingle (Pierce Brosnan) who would rise to be World Champion by the age of twenty-one and retired at age twenty-eight.

Giant is a sports biopic that shows flashes of brilliance but mostly stays entrenched in genre tropes. There is a really interesting story here and two central performances worth watching but every time it seems like it might fly it settles back down into standard fare.

It begins with Naseem Hamed at the young age of seven when his mother asks boxing coach Brendan Ingle if he can train Naseem and his brothers so that they can protect themselves from the everyday racism and abuse they suffer at school. Ingle immediately recognises Naseem’s amazing footwork and sets his focus on one day making him great. What follows is an interesting take on a father/son relationship that highlights how both parties can be held accountable for the insurmountable rift that developed between them later. 

Brosnan plays Ingle wonderfully stealing the entire film with a scene in his boxing club where he is interviewed by a local TV Station. El-Masry nails Hamed’s stratospheric ego and certainly looks the part. He is let down by some awful staging in the boxing fights that make them look like a video-game.

The film’s greatest facets are its leads and the nuanced matter of how both Hamed and Ingle contributed to their falling out and inability to communicate with each other despite being so close at the beginning of their relationship. The film fails however in its functional presentation of the boxing genre and a series of montages that lack the inspirational feel they should have. The fact that they fail to capture the level of excitement that a short highlight reel on YouTube  can provide is a poor indictment of what is on screen here. 

Worth a watch but unlike its protagonist this does not belong with the Boxing greats in the film world.