Director: Stephen Frears
Starring: Ben Foster,  Chris O’Dowd,  Lee Pace,  Jesse Plemons, Guillaume Canet,  Edward Hogg,  Elaine Cassidy,  Laura Donnelly,  Dustin Hoffman,  Bryan Greenberg
Running time: 103 mins
Rating: 15

With THE PROGRAM, it is easy to cut straight to the chase: it’s a compelling, well-paced sports biopic that boasts a superb and chilling performance from Ben Foster. 

Director Stephen Frears has joined forces with screenwriter John Hodge (TRAINSPOTTING), to deliver a kinetic tale of cyclist Lance Armstrong’s inexorable rise to near canonisation and his subsequent vertiginous fall from grace.

The biopic starts in the 90s with Armstrong – played here with mesmerising intensity by Ben Foster – a little-known young cyclist on his first Tour de France being interviewed by sports journalist David Walsh (Chris O’Dowd), and showing ego and ambition to burn.  As we scroll through the years with dazzling, pacy style, the furiously driven Armstrong soon comes up against the ultimate foe: his own body, both in his lack of killer physical potential on a gruelling mountain race, but also his own mortality when diagnosed with Stage Three testicular cancer. For a competitive sportsman, Armstrong’s whole physique was essentially the wrong type to make him a natural champion and despite his recovery and remission from the life-threatening disease, his physicality was not enough. 

Facing the toughest battle of his life, even more so than his cycling races, Armstrong recovers from cancer and goes on to found one of road racings most successful ever teams, US Postal. An amazing feat for any man to notch up so many victories and even more so for a man who was so sick – not to mention the fruitful success of the rest of his team. Suspicious results? Of course. 

Involved with Armstrong’s miraculous recovery is Guillaume Canet who plays Michele Ferrari. The notorious Italian doctor-coach hooked up Armstrong on EPO, the performance-enhancing glycoprotein hormone which powered every one of his Tour de France victories. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t just him reeling the benefits of the enhancements drugs, the whole US Postal Service team ended up doing it, and as the improved results surged them to the top of the pack, they developed sophisticated methods for swapping blood back and forth to outfox the testing officials.

Such results aroused suspicion in The Times journalist David Walsh, who is played brilliantly by Chris O’Dowd. He refused to believe that his recovery and professional success was anything short of cheating. O’Dowd perfectly captures the conflict of a man who risked his own career to prove Armstrong was a doping cheat. For Armstrong, with success came fame and the more he achieved, the more determined Walsh became to expose his secret physical weapon.

BREAKING BAD’s Jesse Plemons is excellent as deeply conflicted fellow cyclist Floyd Landis, who is coaxed into joining what amounted to the USPS team’s doping support staff.

However, throughout the film, it is Ben Foster who ignites the action and tension within the biopic. In THE PROGRAM, he shows what a blisteringly good actor he is and is spookily fantastic in his portrayal of Lance Armstrong. In fact, it would be easy to go as far as saying it is almost creepy how much he resembles the cyclist. Not just with how he looks, but more so in the way that he looks; his mannerisms and gestures are nothing short of astonishing. 

The plot moves along at a well-structured pace and proves to be fascinating whether you are familiar with the athletes exploits or not. For those non-familiar, it has the necessary investigative sports journalism required to show how it was exposed, it has the information about the doping procedure and does not try to paint the whole scandal with rose-tinted glasses. 

From THE PROGRAM, it is clear that Armstrong is a complex character who should be admired for his excellent work on cancer awareness, but despite showing his respectable side with his charity, THE PROGRAM does not shy away from the ultimate fact that one of cycling’s most famous competitors unfortunately became a liar and a cheat. 

Frears and his team deliver tour-de-force cinema with THE PROGRAM, allowing raw ambition to fuel the film and take the audience on an exhilarating ride. 

Verdict

Please follow and like us: