Giant (dir. Rowan Athale)

by Jack Martin | Jan 8, 2026

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 110 mins

UK Distributor: True Brit Entertainment

UK Release Date: 9 January 2026

WHO’S IN GIANT?

Amir El-Masry, Pierce Brosnan, Toby Stephens, Katherine Dow Blyton, Olivia Barrowclough, Elika Ashoori, Austin Haynes, Rocco Haynes, Oliver Joseph Brooke, Arian Nik, Ali Saleh, Ghaith Saleh

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Rowan Athale (director, writer), Stuart Ford, Mark Lane, Kevin Sampson and Ross Williams (producers), Neil Athale (composer), Larry Smith (cinematographer), Laurence Johnson (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

British-Yemeni boxer Naseem Hamed (El-Masry) rises in the sport…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON GIANT?

To perhaps nobody’s surprise, Sylvester Stallone is listed as an executive producer on boxing biopic Giant, because not only is there the clear Rocky inspiration in its depiction of an underdog athlete rising through the ranks of his sport, but there’s also an argument to be made that this film is perhaps a stealth remake of Rocky V. Much like writer-director Rowan Athale’s film, the much-maligned fifth instalment in the Rocky Balboa saga, once positioned as the final entry in the series before its revitalisation years later, saw a radical shift in direction that found Stallone’s brain-damaged fighter now in a position where he trains a much younger and more cocksure boxer, whose arrogance eventually outgrows his ambition and drives a wedge between him and his trainer.

You could almost describe Giant as word-for-word exactly what Rocky V is, to where it even has its own equivalent to that film’s standout character George Washington Duke in the form of a similarly bullish boxing promoter played by Toby Stephens (making this, along with Pierce Brosnan’s involvement, also an unlikely Die Another Day reunion). But neither Rocky’s influence nor that of its starry executive producer can save Athale’s film from a number of odd narrative choices which ultimately prevent it from giving one the same fist-pumping energy as an actual Rocky movie.

The film begins in 1981 Sheffield, as retired Irish boxer Brendan Ingle (Brosnan) is running a local gym for young athletes as a means of getting them off the streets. One of them, at his Yemeni migrant parents’ request, is seven-year-old Naseem Hamed (Ghaith Saleh), whose extreme self-confidence and showmanship inside the ring quickly impresses Ingle, who senses greatness in the young lad and swiftly negotiates his 25% cut of his future professional earnings. Years later, Hamed (Amir El-Masry) – now going by the moniker “Prince Naseem” – is fighting for championship titles with Ingle in his corner, earning all sorts of attention for his arrogant and self-aggrandising boasting of being the greatest boxer on the planet, his skills coming directly from Allah himself. Naturally, that doesn’t sit all too well with Ingle, who feels as though he’s not being given his due credit for nurturing the boxer’s undeniable talent, and as Prince Naseem’s winning streak takes him to bigger and bigger heights, his relationship with Ingle takes a nosedive to almost unreconcilable depths.

Boxing fans will of course know Naseem Hamed to be one of the sport’s most prominent figures, having won numerous featherweight title matches in his career and overcoming initial prejudice toward his Arab background in order to do so. That makes it all the weirder that Giant, rather than focusing primarily on Naseem’s rise to glory, treats the real-life figure almost as an aside, choosing instead to centre much of the film around Brosnan’s Ingle. Given that Brosnan is a much more marketable name than Amir El-Masry (a great actor in his own right, but prolifically is nowhere near as prominent as his co-star), it is to a point understandable why there’s much more of a focus on Ingle instead of Hamed, but it’s no less suspicious that all of the development and personal growth you would expect from the British-Arab figure is given instead to someone who should be much more of a supporting player rather than the lead he’s being hyped up as.

There’s an unfortunate sense of whitewashing as Ingle is given the lion’s share of the film’s drama as well as its biggest character arc, while Hamed remains relatively one-note by comparison, to a point where he feels like an accessory in a film that’s meant to be about his life and career. None of it is Brosnan’s fault, nor is it El-Masry’s, with both actors doing well in conveying the rising tension between their characters as their ambitions far outweigh their moral intent, but Athale’s script clearly favours one over the other and constantly shoves many of Hamed’s real-life achievements to the side while focusing on the bitterness that starts to brew within Ingle and his eventual humbling during the relatively low-key final act. Because of that, you come away from Giant knowing more about the trainer than you do the boxer, the latter of whom the script constantly finds ways to demonise with his overwhelming dickishness making him more obnoxious than three-dimensional, especially in scenes where he and even some of his family members act exactly like certain characters straight out of Rocky V.

Speaking of Rocky, the film offers plenty of the usual boxing movie tropes that the Stallone movie popularised, from the montage of numerous wins to triumphant music playing during the training scenes, but since there’s a noticeable lack of focus on the boxer himself, such moments fall emotionally flat. You don’t really care that much about this guy not just because the film barely gives him enough of a presence to shine beyond his bullish arrogance, but also due to the fact that there’s never really a point in the story where it feels like he’s about to learn any kind of lesson from a crushing defeat or personal loss, making him a character who doesn’t seem to truly grow as a person, no matter how hard he trains or fights. To that end, even the recent Christy emerges as the better boxing biopic, because it at least focuses on the actual person and not showing it vicariously through someone else’s eyes.

The simple act of making Naseem Hamed the core focus of Giant rather than the more marketable – and, let’s be honest here, white – supporting character would have avoided many of the unfortunate implications that you cannot seem to shake whilst watching an otherwise conventional sports biopic. At this rate, you might actually be better off watching Rocky V instead.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Giant is a conventional boxing biopic that’s weighed down by blatant whitewashing that takes focus away from British-Arab athlete Naseem Hamed, who comes off as noticeably one-dimensional by comparison, and onto the less prominent but more marketable Pierce Brosnan as Hamed’s trainer.