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Critics Consensus: Ben Foster's impressive efforts to channel Lance Armstrong are often enough to power The Program past director Stephen Frears' frustrating unwillingness to delve deeper into its real-life story.
Critic Consensus: Ben Foster's impressive efforts to channel Lance Armstrong are often enough to power The Program past director Stephen Frears' frustrating unwillingness to delve deeper into its real-life story.
All Critics (106) | Top Critics (12) | Fresh (65) | Rotten (41)
The flashily photographed enterprise too often becomes a blur of sound bites and slick aesthetics akin to a Nike commercial.
For a story about incredibly focused determination - and if nothing else, Lance Armstrong had that - the film remains strangely uninvolved.
"The Program" fails to add anything new, or penetrate the soul of so crafty a cheater.
It never goes deep on what it was that produced the awfulness that is Lance Armstrong.
"The Program," much to its detriment, concentrates almost exclusively on the history of the doping effort . There is no mention of his childhood or adolescence or any attempt to analyze his character.
Foster nails Armstrong, right down to his final, clenched-jaw TV confession to Oprah Winfrey but The Program's glancing narrative feels less secure.
The Program is never less than interesting, and the cast is high-caliber. However, the movie makes us want to know more, rather than come away with the sense that we've been through an experience ourselves.
Foster, though, delivers a strong and convincing performance, and I could watch films about Armstrong and his evil machinations for ever. This one may fail to unearth many of his mysteries, but it is a confident, if understated, offering.
The abiding achievement of the film rests throughout with Foster, who can shift on a dime from the charismatic to the repellent and whose Armstrong is at his most grimly compelling when engaged in an ongoing commentary with himself.
The Program can be viewed as especially relevant, given that doping in sport is coincidentally, in the news again.
All said and done, if you want to gain a perspective on what went wrong in Armstrong's professional pursuits, this film is worth a watch. But if you have plans of discovering more about the man himself, we'll just have to wait for a more solid reboot.
Poor Ben Foster is on a truly thankless mission playing such an unlikeable character. But the film does just about get there in the end, helped by some shocking scenes and the sheer power of the underlying story.
This is one of those biopics that tells a story that we all know and doesn't manage the necessary to raise it above its limitations; instead, it suffers from a one-dimensional protagonist that never becomes intriguing and ends so abruptly that it feels like Frears got tired of telling it.
Super Reviewer
I thought this was a riveting tale of the whole Lance Armstrong doping saga, I am not sure how accurate it was in terms of factual information but it was exceedingly enjoyable.
There is something to a Stephen Frears picture that is always appealing. I never expect much from them, but I typically end up with something pretty great. I've probably watched Philomena a handful of times since 2013 because I tend to show it to people who have never heard of it. The same could be said of The Queen or High Fidelity. These aren't major, milestone pieces, but they are always quenching in a way only Frears can seem to deliver. Maybe I should have went in with those same non-existent expectations to the English directors latest, but either way The Program would probably be something of a minor letdown. This isn't to say the film isn't good, in fact it has a lot of positive things going for it and I honestly wasn't ready to see it come to an end when it did, but the typical pop that comes with a Frears production just isn't at play here. Given Frears had painted a moving and somewhat revealing picture of Queen Elizabeth in his Oscar-nominated 2006 film I thought he might be up to something similar with his Lance Armstrong biopic, but alas there is no alternate version of Armstrong's life that the news reports haven't already divulged. Instead, Frears recounts the highs and lows of Armstrong's career with a compelling flow and solid performances, but nothing to give it that extra oomph to make it something truly special. read the whole review at www.reviewsfromabed.com
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