Risen

Boxing’s featherweight category might not be in the same league as the heavyweight class, but you’ve still got to tip a hat to indefatigable Welsh boxer Howard Winstone. After an industrial accident caused him to lose three fingers from his right hand, Winstone persevered to make an impressive comeback by winning the WBC world featherweight title in 1968. Whether his life story justifies a drama is a moot point, especially one so rife with the clichés of join-the-dots filmmaking. With its soft-focus lensing and plaintive orchestral soundtrack (save for one well-judged use of ‘Moonlight Sonata’), Neil Jones’s film is better suited to TV. Producer Stuart Brennan makes a fair fist of the lead but what irks is the conventional chronological format that sees the film totter from accident and parental enthusiasm through death, strained marriage and countless training sessions to a padded-out round of (competently staged) title fights. Boxing fans may appreciate it, but for anyone else ‘Risen’ is emotionally inert, too long and not so interesting.