If there's anything Hollywood loves, it's a rags to riches story.
The only thing it likes better is the polar opposite: a fall from grace. The
story of cycling champion Lance Armstrong's descent from hero to top heel due
to a doping scandal has all of the ingredients to make an incredibly incisive,
razor sharp story about athletics, celebrity, media, and more. It had
everything. And yet Stephen Frears' The
Program offers absolutely
zero insight into Armstrong, who he was, or why he did what he did. It doesn't
even offer up a compelling look at his cycling career, which begs the question:
Why does this movie even exist?
It exists to give a platform to Ben
Foster, one of the most underrated actors working today. It's unfortunately
rare to find him in a lead role with this much potential, and yet the
screenplay by John Hodge (Trance) offers him very little to sink his teeth
into. The film begins in the '90s before Armstrong is...well, Lance
Armstrong, when he's still a fresh-faced cyclist with a hunger to win and a
sunny outlook on the sport. He's still clean, basically. But after being told
repeatedly that he doesn't have the right body type to be a winner, Armstrong
turns to sports doctor Michele Ferrari (Guillaume Canet) for a little bit
of help. He begins by taking the drug Erythropoietin (or EPA), and it
helps him gain his first significant wins. Just as his career was taking off,
Armstrong was struck by testicular cancer that put everything on hold. 
If Armstrong is known for anything, beyond
being a liar and cheat, it's his desire to win. That drive gets him through
brutal chemotherapy and the loss of a testicle. When he's recovered, he only
wants to be champion more, turning back to Ferrari to help him do it. He
assembles a team led by bullying manager Johan Bruyneel (Denis Menochet)
to protect him as he wins Tour de France after Tour de France, all while on
Ferrari's illegal doping regiment, which they call simply "The
Program". But Armstrong's actions catch the eye of cycling enthusiast and
journalist Dylan Walsh (Chris O'Dowd), who has been a fan of his since the
beginning. His curiosity begins the investigations that would ultimately bring
Armstrong down.
Here's the thing: most of this is swept
through in about 30 minutes, with the film looking like a brief PBS documentary
on Armstrong, not a feature-length biopic. We catch brief glimpses of key
moment; Armstrong's victories, the cancer, drugs, suspicion, more drugs,
betrayal, and finally it all goes up in smoke. There's very little attempt to
connect the viewer with Armstrong's motivation, or to engage us with him or his
supporters. That includes the under-utilized Jesse Plemons as Floyd Landis, who
was key to exposing Armstrong as a fraud. There are characters who pop up in
one scene, made to seem important, then simply vanish. Armstrong's wife is one
such character. Why introduce her at all?
It suggests Frears and Hodge had no
earthly idea what kind of story they wanted to tell about Armstrong, just that
they wanted to make a movie about him while the time was right. Well, the time
wasn't right and The Program definitely isn't the right film.
Perhaps it's time to just close the book on Armstrong and let him fade into
infamy where he belongs.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
