Kritiken

[Foster gives] a bold, remote, practically inhuman performance, which gets hilariously underlined at one point when Armstrong mentions that the supremely likable Matt Damon is in talks to play him (in another movie that never got made). There is nothing remotely likable, or even relatable, about Lance Armstrong in The Program. He's just an ass-covering asshole, which is the sole interesting aspect of an otherwise pedestrian Wiki-history.

The Program is a failure of dramatic imagination. Frears and Hodge allow their contempt for Armstrong to cloud their understanding of him—an issue that's intensified by Foster's unsurprising decision to fetishize the cyclist as a passive-aggressive monster (and exacerbated by the supporting cast, which collectively reduces a variety of characters to suit the assorted typecasting of the respective actors playing them).

The logistics of maintaining such an elaborate lie for so long makes for a fascinating procedural, but they're too often lapped by extensive reenactments of contests — whether on the Tour or in a courtroom — whose outcomes we already know.

It's getting harder to make contemporary biopics work I think since we can see the people themselves on CNN and watch the stories unfold in something like real time. What more can we really discover about Armstrong?

Even though the outcome will surely be known to almost everyone who sees it, Stephen Frears's film tells its story with a brio that keeps it taut and consistently watchable... What's [unexpected] is that, thanks partly to Hodge's intelligent script and Foster's empathetic performance, Armstrong finally comes across – for all his lying, arrogance and psychopathic behaviour – as a surprisingly pitiable figure.

Frears' film doesn't attempt to dig up anything new or profound so much as zip entertainingly round the twists and turns of an episode of recent sporting villainy whose fascination happily survives the retelling.

Everybody knows Armstrong's story by now, and John Hodge's screenplay excavates few factual or emotional nuances that weren't covered in Alex Gibney's thorough 2013 doc "The Armstrong Lie." [It's] styled in semi-documentary fashion itself, with a committedly clenched lead performance by Ben Foster that never quite catches up to its distant subject.