Blazin' Saddles: The Program film review and David Walsh Q&A

If you're reading this blog the likelihood is that you're a long term cycling fan who has followed Lance Armstrong's rise and fall with piqued interest (and increasing nausea) for the best part of two decades.

It's people like you and me who will flood the theatres and cinemas to watch with eager curiosity this take on the biggest sporting fraud in history.

And it's people like you and me who have given director Stephen Frears slight cause for concern.

"It's impossible to please the cycling fans because they spot everything that's wrong about the bikes and the technical aspect of the story," Frears said at a Q&A after Wednesday night's screening of The Program. "But I've always seen it not so much as a cycling film but as a heist movie."

There's certainly no denying that there's more than a hint of Steven Soderbergh's Oceans Trilogy when each of the main characters are introduced with an action-to-still as their names appear across the screen in capital letters at a jaunty angle to a catchy soundtrack.

"In fact, I rather turned my back on the cycling aspect," admits the well-spoken director of films such as High Fidelity, Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters. "I just thought it was a very good crime movie."

Frears' words elicited a lot of laughs from the audience at The Barbican. But the fact that, once the audience were invited to ask their own questions, four out of every five asked were directed to the Sunday Times journalist David Walsh - and not Frears - is extremely telling.

Frears may be most interested in the human aspect of this sporting swindle but the vast majority of the people who pay money to see the film will do so because they're avid followers of cycling. And they, I'm afraid, may find aspects of this cycling movie rather pedestrian.

It was always going to be a tricky task bringing the Armstrong scandal to the silver screen. Because many of us know the story inside-out there is so much onus on both the casting and how this familiar tale is told.

Much of the casting is spot-on. Ben Foster captures Armstrong's hunger, competitive drive, win-at-all-costs mentality and his Machiavellian megalomania to a tee, while tempering the former seven-time Tour winner's duplicitous, bullying nature with a more compassionate streak, one rooted in his battle with cancer.

If anything, Foster's portrayal is sympathetic to Armstrong (perhaps stemming from the actor's covert and controversial decision to take performance enhancing drugs to get into character).

Denis Menochet is brilliant as Armstrong's directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel, relieved that his own retirement can relax his strict eating habits (and his waistline accordingly). Guillaume Canet not only has the look of a young Michele Ferrari but embodies perfectly the infamous doping doctor's excitement as the EPO revolution opens doors to the world of sporting science (in one superb scene, Ferrari responds with incredulity when a senior doctor suggests that using EPO on healthy athletes would be unethical).

While the decision to cast anarchic Australian Mark Little (that's Joe Mangel from Neighbours to you and me) as the Aussie journo Rupert Guinness is as inspired as the character's array of Hawaiian shirts is authentic, most viewers may not be familiar enough with the Sydney Morning Herald reporter (and his sartorial sense) for this to be fully appreciated.

But the best - that's to say, most realistic - performances come from two of the minor roles: Elaine Cassidy is so convincing that she might as well have been Betsy Andreu, while Jesse Plemons captures the naivety, elation, confusion, bitterness and anger of Floyd Landis with aplomb (the scene where he calls Foster's out-of-retirement Armstrong to ask for a place on his team at Astana is perhaps the best in the entire film).

Walsh himself is played by the six-foot-three Irish actor and comedian Chris O'Dowd - something which delighted the five-foot-six investigative reporter Walsh, whose book Seven Deadly Sins provided the basis of the film's screenplay.

From his early admiration of a young Armstrong to his disbelief at the American's post-cancer transformation, his subsequent beavered questioning and resultant ostracisation from the press pack, Dowd does an excellent job at portraying one man's struggle to unearth the truth.

Except in reality it was never one man's struggle.

This is where the film starts to lose its cadence. Paul Kimmage, for instance, is never mentioned, depriving viewers that infamous moment when the embattled Irish journalist referred to Armstrong as "the cancer of the sport" during a press conference. Pierre Ballaster, the French journalist with whom Walsh wrote his accusatory book L.A. Confidential, is wholly omitted.

This may simply be an attempt to keep the story simple and not over-complicated matters - the same reason why Armstrong's wives and children are barely introduced, why there's no Greg LeMond and why Armstrong's comeback stops with his third place for Astana in 2009 and glosses over his troubled final year at RadioShack. (Of course, legal issues may be to blame, too.)

But it is precisely these omissions that make the story incomplete for the cycling-savvy audience. As Frears inferred - nothing escapes the attention of a collective of fans who, for the most part, will pounce with a bilious 140-character precis on any rider who, say, breaks one of the unwritten rules of cycling, let alone an actor who tries to convince us he's been riding a bike all his life.

As much as we're impressed by Menochet's comedic likeness to Bruyneel and can see echoes of the tortured Landis in the excellent Plemons, we're left exasperated by the actor playing Alberto Contador looking more like Gert Steegmans than the real El Pistolero.

Eyebrows are raised - well, mine were, at least - when Oscar Pereiro stands alongside Landis on the podium not only in spectacles but also the white Banesto kit (instead of the black and red of Caisse d'Epargne). How hard can it be to find an extra who vaguely resembles Ivan Basso? And what of the curious absence of Jan Ullrich - Armstrong's biggest rival - who is never mentioned, only seen once alongside the Texan on the podium (another questionable lookalike).

Throughout the film we see too many bulging biceps squeezing out of lycra (even a supposedly emaciated Foster - in the post-cancer scenes - is too bulky to be a convincing cyclist) while a journalist working away into the wee hours alongside a coffee plunger reeks is more hackneyed than, well, a decaf soya latte.

Confusing matters further, the film is consistently spliced with archive footage so we jump between images of the real Armstrong and Foster's fictional one; at times it's highly effective, but not always. While it does lend the movie an element of realism, it does inadvertently give Messrs Liggett and Sherwin more lines in the entire film than all of the other journalists put together, including Walsh (whose role is in fact very under played).

All in all, there's a (perhaps unavoidable) element of parody and pantomime that runs through the veins of The Program. It has a distinctive docu-drama feel - with action sequences coming across like those battle re-enactments put on by weekend hobby groups (although admittedly in a much slicker manner). The net result is that it feel more like a TV film than a Hollywood blockbuster - and for that reason, many would be better off waiting until it's out on DVD or shown on television.

But most of us won't wait. We can't wait. We have to see this film - and quite rightly so. We're curious to see this recreation of reality, this version of veracity, to marvel at the many moments when Frears and his cast hit the bullseye and cringe when what we see amounts to the cinematic equivalent of a Europcar team time trial (the condensed 10-second wooing and wedding of Armstrong's first wife, for example).

Funnily enough, had The Program actually been made for TV like a big-budget series it could well have improved matters. Such a complex story arc is nigh-on impossible to cram into a single film - especially one that only runs for 103 minutes. If Tolkein's The Hobbit can be stretched out over three films then the tale of cycling's Smeagol surely merits at least two hours of our time.

While the film may merit 3/5 stars the night rose to a strong 4.5 stars by virtue of the quick-fire Q&A during which an extremely engaging Walsh took centre stage, answering a raft of questions in the sold-out auditorium.

Walsh told the audience that both he and Travis Tygart - the man who led USADA's investigation - were "the two people Armstrong could never forgive, although God knows why we need his forgiveness."

Despite Armstrong telling Oprah that he owed the Irish journalist an apology, Walsh confirmed that he has still yet to be contacted by the disgraced cyclist who, had the truth never been uncovered, he is sure would have become President of the United States one day.

On Armstrong's on-going path to redemption, Walsh said, "Lance is taking his truths from an a la carte menu," adding: "You redeem yourself by admitting 100 per cent - not 60 or 70 per cent of the truth."

Intriguingly, Walsh admitted to admiring the scientific brain, tenacity and all-round chutzpah of Doctor Ferrari. "Ferrari was Frankenstein and Lance was his monster - and I think both Ferrari and Lance liked that," he said.

As question after question was thrown at Walsh and not Frears, it became clear that the audience was made up more of cycling fans than movie buffs. It was extremely revealing that the last question of the night not only was one for Walsh, it also had nowt to do with The Program: did Walsh believe the 2015 Tour to be entirely free from doping.

Walsh took the opportunity to reiterate his belief that Chris Froome was clean and, it has to be said, he made his case convincingly - drawing on his time spent within Team Sky and his various interviews with employers of the British team, past and present.

He rubbished claims that by working for a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper he held any ostensible allegiance towards Team Sky and said he would be first to publish a damning story in the Sunday Times were he to have any evidence of wrongdoing by the famished Froome and his spindly team-mates.

Indeed, should such a turn of events ever happen and Sky were found to have bent the rules under the nose of the very man who brought down Armstrong, well, The Program would have a bloody good sequel in the offing. Frears would have to rein in the biceps, mind.