Several actors portrayed Naseem Hamed throughout this film, and for my taste, the twelve-year-old version (Ali Saleh) was slightly better than his seven-year-old counterpart (Ghaith Saleh). That meant that Amir El-Masry, who played the adult Naseem, didn’t really stand out to me as representing the incredibly charismatic person he is. And he certainly *is* charismatic – I once had lunch with him and Frank Warren in Knightsbridge, which was a lot of fun! Anyway, I'm mentioning that as an aside. The Hamed family were growing up in Sheffield, which wasn’t always easy for people of color, and their mother, who ran a shop, knew that Brendan Ingle (Pierce Brosnan) had a boxing gym nearby. She managed to convince him to let them learn some self-defense, and he agreed in exchange for some truly awkward singing. The youngest, Naseem, was too smart to participate in the singing; instead, he showed off footwork similar to Michael Jackson’s, and his trainer realized he had found something special. Weighing a little over seven stones, he got his first fight, and the film follows his career up until he met legendary promoter Warren (Toby Stephens) and then went on to perform at “The Garden” before things started to fall apart with Ingle and Hamed. The fact that both of Ingle’s sons and Naz himself have been involved in promoting this movie suggests there's some truth to what it depicts, but I struggled to connect with El-Masry’s portrayal. The child actors had a confidence and boldness that felt very believable and amusing. However, when the story moves into adulthood, too much happens too quickly, and while the fight footage is well shot, he didn’t seem to capture the supreme arrogance of someone who knew how to tease, provoke, and entertain audiences. Brosnan does a decent job showing Ingle as a man who saw boxing as preparation for life beyond the ring, and he has good chemistry with the younger Naseems, but again, their separation feels rushed, so I didn’t feel there was much depth to the almost father-son relationship between them. It also fails to explain to those unfamiliar with him just how famous Hamed became—how much of a role model he was for working class kids across the UK and how his showmanship changed British boxing into a world of big money entertainment. I think it’s worth seeing, but overall, I found it a bit too shallow.

Source on TMDB