Amir El-Masry is the lucky owner of one of the great faces in modern cinema, and he got to show it off not once but twice at this year’s London Film Festival. Unfortunately in neither case was it shown off to his best advantage. The less said about 100 Nights a Hero the better, and Giant (a thoughtlessly generic title) manages somehow not to be about what it’s about. This boxing movie, which should have had the courage to follow its real hero, instead tells a modern story in an old-fashioned way. It’s a major disappointment.
This is because rather than Giant being the biopic of “Prince” Naseem Hamed (Mr. El-Masry), the champion British boxer, it is the biopic of Brendan Ingle (Pierce Brosnan), his trainer. Brendan runs a boxing gym in Sheffield (Sean Bean’s hometown) where his unorthodox style of working child amateurs alongside adult professionals has cost him his training license. It’s the 1980s but attitudes to race might as well be in the dark ages, and the Irish Brendan meets the three Hamed brothers because their mother thinks they need to learn to fight for their own safety. The youngest, Naseem (who is played as a child by Ali Saleh and as a pre-teen by Ghaith Saleh, both extremely good), is what the British call cheeky and Americans call obnoxious, always with a smart remark and an aggravating insistence on his own way. He has the talent to back up the chat, and even the most brutal racists are silenced by his skills in the ring, but boy howdy does he know just how good he is. Brendan encourages Naseem’s arrogance with the idea that it will make him a better fighter, but this backfires in more ways than one.
We see Brendan’s home life and family relationships in detail, but there are no scenes of Naseem as a child at home, only his interactions with Brendan. In the single brief scene of an adult Naseem outside of the boxing world, his wife and child are not even given their names. On top of this Naseem’s brothers grow up to be his managers, but we see them only through Brendan’s eyes. It’s clear Giant neither knows nor cares about Naseem except in how he relates to Brendan. The boxing scenes are well staged, although at least one is visibly reliant on dreadful CGI, and while Mr. El-Masry has a great time demonstrating the gleeful cockiness which Naseem brought to his fights, he is also too old for the part. The use of a female boxing journalist (Olivia Barrowclough) as the audience stand-in is a fresh twist on the old trope, and Mr. Brosnan does his normal excellent work as someone who knows how to get the best from others regardless of the cost to himself. And yet the main arc is the gulf that eventually grows between Naseem and Brendan over how much credit Brendan is due for Naseem’s success.
But even with Toby Stephens doing solid work as an excellent boxing promoter, the focus shouldn’t have been on these interpersonal dynamics. Naseem’s rise to glory as a major talent and one of the first Muslims in the British public eye should have been interesting enough on its own. So why on earth did writer/director Rowan Athale choose to sideline his own hero? It’s unpleasant to think that the answer might be because we are not as far as we should be from some of the attitudes on display, but regardless, it’s unforgivable. They really ought to scrap this edit of Giant and start again.
Giant recently played at the London Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the LFF site for the title.
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