‘Giant’ review: Pierce Brosnan and Amir El-Masry pull no punches in featherweight boxing biopic

Dir/scr: Rowan Athale. UK. 2025. 110mins

At first glance, British feature Giant is a by-the-book sports biopic, tracing the career of boxing champion Naseem Hamed, a.k.a. Prince Naseem, from childhood in the North of England to transatlantic success, from Mansfield to Madison Square Garden. Rowan Athale’s film is indeed something of a hagiography – but not the one you expect. While ‘Naz’ is hardly a supporting player in this story, the real ‘giant’ celebrated here is the lesser-known Brendan Ingle, Hamed’s trainer, evoked in a genially charismatic performance by Pierce Brosnan.

Unpretentious, somewhat generic venture

It’s this veteran’s presence in particular that lifts an unpretentious, somewhat generic venture that is unlikely to be a major mainstream contender but will surely have streaming appeal to sports fans, especially in the UK, following its London Film Festival debut. True Brit will release in the UK/Ireland, while Vertical Entertainment have US rights.

The film begins in 1997 with Hamed’s US debut, his MSG fight against Kevin Kelley, with the Prince impishly displaying his trademark dance-like footwork before delivering the hefty blows. Athale then jumps back to early-80s Sheffield, where trainer and gym boss Ingle offers to train three young brothers from a Yemeni family facing racist threats. The most talented, and savviest, is the youngest, seven-year old Naseem (cheerfully brazen newcomer Ghaith Saleh) – who, under Brendan’s tutelage, comes to be a force of nature and a boundary-busting British Muslim hero. As an adult (played by Amir El-Masry), he is eventually taken up by star-making promoter Frank Warren (Toby Stephens, going all out in a roaring wide-boy performance). 

But Naseem’s power, the film argues, is also his Achilles heel. Brendan has taught him to hold onto the racist hostility he faces, to let it fuel his strength and courage – and also taught him that his seemingly innate confidence is worth pushing to the limit. But the young Naseem’s disarming cheek becomes abrasive arrogance in the adult, leading him to disavow his mentor’s importance.

With members of the Ingle family credited as advisers, Giant is clearly partial in its depiction of this surrogate father-son relationship, with the boxer depicted as fickle and even callous and Ingle as devoted and ill-treated – even if it also shows him as attention-seeking, wearyingly garrulous, and arguably exploitative as a businessman. The tensions between the two men come to a head in a climactic dialogue scene, at which point Athale pulls a narrative fast one in a way that is frustrating but not unintelligent in terms of finally putting the film’s emotional issues on the table.

The director of features Wasteland and Strange But True and a writer on TV’s Gangs of London, Athale directs in an energetic but unflashy, somewhat meat-and-potatoes manner. The opening sequence unashamedly pastiches Raging Bull, while the narrative follows struggle-against-adversity tropes from the classic boxing-movie repertoire, not least Rocky (indeed, Sylvester Stallone is among Giant’s executive producers). 

El-Masry – familiar from UK features Limbo and In Camera, and currently to be seen in London closer 100 Nights of Hero – vividly summons the spirit of the Prince’s screw-you cockiness, with a convincing dynamism in the jazzy posturing and slinky sidesteps. But a schematic script doesn’t really give him the chance to reveal the more elusive depths of Naseem’s character. As for Brosnan, this stage of his career has seen him apparently out for fun in his choice of roles (e.g. in Netflix’s recent cosy crime offering The Thursday Murder Club), and his playful spirit serves him well as he heartily pushes both Brendan’s gab and his sound moral principles – even if the film can’t quite get further than Ingle being a flawed but no-bullshit street saint.

Apart from the Scorsese homage, Athale throws in a distracting passage of newsprint-style animation to show the Prince’s progress, while VFX serves adequately to make the film’s bouts seem to take place in epic settings – although the US sequences never quite lift above the cheap-and-cheerful, rather than the championship level.