The Best Sports Movies You've Never Seen

Twenty-Four Seven (1997)
Director: Bob Hoskins
Starring: Bob Hoskins, Bruce Jones
BBC, 96 minutes







Twenty-Four Seven, the low-budget debut from director Shane Meadows about amateur boxing, was shot in black and white in an industrial town in England - but let’s see if we can get through this without using the word “gritty”, shall we?

On paper the film might appear to have all the elements of a boxing ‘Billy Elliot’ - a tale of working-class lads escaping from the drudgery of their lives via a new-found discipline. But be warned - this is no ballet-loving granny-pleaser: this film is more likely to take you out the back and kick your teeth in.

‘Twenty Four Seven’ is the story of Alan Darcy’s (Bob Hoskins) attempt to open a boxing club in a dead-end town to give local kids something to do, away from a life of unemployment and petty crime. Darcy recalls the boxing club he visited as a boy and decides that he wants to provide the same for the youth of today. But before he can get them in the ring, he needs to get them to stop fighting between themselves. The boys are a bunch of misfits - they include a junkie, a mildly-psychotic fighter and the chubby son of the club's dodgy financier. The turning point comes when Darcy arranges a trip to the Welsh countryside - this release for the boys from their housing estate environment inspires and motivates them to get into shape for a tournament against a local club.

The boxing scenes are brief and there is no magical transformation from bad lads to boxing greats - what this film shows more is the tenacity and guts of the boys who have at last found something to believe in. Beautifully shot, this is a great piece of British cinema which is genuinely funny and engaging, underpinned with those classic themes of self-respect and male bonding. The film never slips into sentimentality, nor is there a straightforward happy ending.

Darcy is a big-hearted, compassionate dreamer, whose philosophy of “Giving it, taking it, living it, making the best of what you've got... twenty four hours a day, seven days a week” gives the film its title. Bob Hoskins is tremendous as Darcy - if you only know him from ‘Mona Lisa’, then you MUST also see ‘The Long Good Friday’, which some would class as the greatest gangster movie ever.

A boxing film is nothing without a great soundtrack (‘Rocky’, ‘When We Were Kings’) - there’s all those tough training sessions that need some inspirational soul and this has it in spades; brilliant, heavy tunes from Tim Buckley, Van Morrison and The Charlatans.

I can’t commend this highly enough to No Mas readers - make an effort with what will be fairly impenetrable accents for those of you stateside and I guarantee that this brilliant bittersweet film will soon rank in your favourites. Just don’t call it gritty.

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After graduating from Oxford University, Jamie Fraser has worked as an intellectual property lawyer in London for the last 7 years. These details, among others, disqualify him from having his biopic shot in black and white.
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This post is part of our ongoing partnership with The Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival which runs from April 25 to May 6 right here in NYC.