It’s nearing a quarter-century since the retirement of “Prince” Naseem Hamed, Sheffield’s world champion boxer of Yemeni heritage. For a while, in the run-up to the new millennium, he was everywhere: transcending the sports section to provide primetime entertainment and front-page news, bolstering his swelling celebrity with both combative talent (career record: 36 wins, only one loss) and a showman swagger that fitted the shameless Nineties to a tee.
What the Gallagher brothers were to the festival stage, so Hamed was to the boxing ring. Just as Oasis are back among us, so too is Prince Naz – albeit in the form of this Sly Stallone-produced biopic, written and directed by Gangs of London’s Rowan Athale, which forces the boxer’s story through the Britfilm cookie cutter and barely stays on its feet.
Athale begins in the early 1980s, where Irish trainer and occasional youth club DJ Brendan Ingle (Pierce Brosnan, introduced gyrating to The Sweet’s ‘Blockbuster’) takes delivery of the three young Hamed brothers from a mother concerned by the skinheads circling the family’s cornershop. Training montages ensue, as the diminutive, dancing Naseem (played by Ghaith and Ali Saleh as a child, and by Limbo’s Amir El-Masry as a young man) out-punches his siblings and starts to climb the Yorkshire boxing ladder. Shot around Sheffield itself, these scrappy early scenes sketch a haphazard spit-and-sawdust circuit, prompting chuckles from the increasingly exasperated relationship between no-nonsense trainer and a fighter who’d rather hang round the arcade trying to impress girls.
Yet one soon realises this story has been afforded much the same kid-gloves handling as the Eddie the Eagle and Elton John biopics. (And that’s even before Toby Stephens turns up, effing and jeffing as the film’s sitcom idea of promoter Frank Warren.) Prejudice may lurk in these hills – schoolboy P‑words, flat-out xenophobia from the man on the Sheffield omnibus – but the nation’s soap operas have had more nuanced and dramatically rewarding things to say about race. That conflict is eventually sublimated into a boxer-trainer squabble over purse money that plays as both contrived and phony. Worse: amid a fumbled final reel, Giant starts to insinuate that it’s really here to promote the Irishman Ingle over his sulky, money-grubbing charge. Initially cartoonish, it ends up deeply compromised and confused.
With the budget depriving Athale of his usual streaming-telly pyrotechnics, the look is forever closer to Mansfield than Madison Square Garden. The leads, at least, give individual scenes a little character. The more we see of him, the more El-Masry resembles Hamed, whether chomping choc ices in training or puffing out his chest on a mock-up TFI Friday.
And there are the minor pleasures of watching Brosnan in his new, relaxed late period, letting his accent meander even as he passes the ultimate test of any movie trainer: you’d want someone this amiable in your corner. The material, however, throws in the towel long before the bathetic finale; the inevitable post-fadeout footage of the real Hamed in his dynamic prime is a hundred times more stirring than anything preceding it.
