The official trailer for the forthcoming boxing biopic, ‘Giant’ has dropped, and it’s fair to say that, judging by the approx two-minute teaser, the movie will be well worth seeing. Starring Pierce Brosnan as legendary Sheffield trainer Brendan Ingle, and Amir El-Masry as Hamed, the film has on board as executive producer Sylvester Stallone. The project came into life quite some months ago, so this is no rush job; nor is it anything like a low budget film.
When the film was first announced, plenty of people (myself included) had a tough time getting their heads around the fact that Brosnan, who is best known for playing James Bond, was to portray the wise old, seen-it-all-invented-plenty-of-it trainer who ran the celebrated, yet at the same time no-thrills Wincobank gym in The Steel City.
But Brosnan, who is of course Irish himself, as was Ingle, really does seem to have nailed it. The somewhat unknown El-Masry, who was born in Cairo and was raised in London (and, fascinatingly, got into the acting game after a chance meeting with movie legend Omar Sharif), also appears to have got his portrayal down; and it cannot have been too easy playing “The Prince,” physically as well as from a verbal impersonation standpoint. But El-Masry clearly managed to get the hang of the famed Naz flip over the top rope gig okay; as did young actor Ali Saleh, who plays the part of the 12 year old Hamed.
Written and directed by Rowan Athlete, the film is set for an October 24 release in the UK.
Some highlights from the trailer are seen during the film’s depiction of the early years, with the footage of a schoolboy Hamed being taken to Ingle’s gym by his mother. Ingle says to the young kid, “to embrace it,” this in referring to the racial insults Hamed was being taunted with at the time. “It’ll make you stronger,” Ingle tells his pupil.
“If he can fight like this now, at his size, at his age, who’s gonna stop him when he’s a man?” Ingle also says in another sound-bite, this as he speaks to Hamed’s mother. In terms of the fight action, the explosiveness of Hamed seems to have been captured well, and El-Masry does look quite a lot like Hamed.
Frank Warren is also depicted in the film, as is Johnny Nelson and Kell Brook. There is no mention in the trailer of Hamed’s humbling loss to Marco Antonio Barrera (yet surely the film will not gloss over this, arguably Hamed’s most famous, indeed defining fight), and looking at the credits, there are no names listed as far as the actors who play Hamed’s key opponents.
The eventual breakup Hamed and Ingle went through appears to have been covered in depth, and Ingle at one point tells his estranged fighter, “I was like a father to you; you’re selfish and arrogant.” To which Hamed shoots back at him, “You nurtured that arrogance.” As boxing fans who watched this well-publicised rift between trainer and fighter happen are painfully aware, this was an especially nasty episode in British boxing.
“You shouldn’t take credit for my success,” Hamed tells a stunned Ingle at one point in the trailer. And later he asks, “who’s more important, the fighter or the trainer?”
Hamed, a truly polarising figure, was a genuine shooting star for a while, before his cocksure attitude led to his downfall. Ironically, the attitude, the sheer sense of self that ended up drowning Hamed was largely what made him the fighter he was. That and uncommon reflexes and raw punching power. And a special, special trainer.
We have seen over the years, many, many boxing films, some of them bio-pics. Not all of them have been great, but some sure were. Hopefully, whatever you may think of Naseem Hamed as both a fighter and as a person, the former featherweight champ will get what he deserves as far as the forthcoming film goes. Perhaps more importantly, here’s hoping Ingle gets his just-dues, too.
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