Philosophical twenty-something Ross Ulbricht creates Silk Road, a dark net website that sells narcotics, while DEA agent Rick Bowden goes undercover to bring him down.
As a person who went to college during the rise and fall of Silk Road, this story feels more personal than other crime dramas. The novelty of bitcoin and the dark web permeated a new drug market and allowed smart internet-savvy citizens the chance to procure hard-to-find drugs. Telling the story of its inventor proved to be a challenge as most cybercrime feels unfilmable (it’s a lot of typing on computers in coffee shops.) I liked this movie a lot more than I should. Jason Clarke brings his A-game while Nick Robinson fills in the gaps as cop and criminal, respectively. While the movie certainly looks like it’s made on a shoestring budget, the two leads propel much of its force making it at least entertaining if not educational.
Ross Ulbricht (Robinson), a directionless libertarian twenty-something, has an idea: what if you could buy and sell drugs over the internet just as easily as an Amazon purchase? Confound the War on Drugs by taking it all online where the government’s burgeoning cyber crimes division was woefully unprepared. Enter Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), a DEA agent sent to finish his career behind a desk after life undercover in the narcotics world turned him into an addict. Bowden can barely type on a keyboard and his technical ineptitude makes him a liability for the cyber crimes division, but his street work primes him to be an early detective on the Silk Road case. As the website grows in popularity the danger grows as well, both men cut away their families and friends when their obsession over the dark web drug trade grows. Both make awful decisions and both circle each other, cop and criminal, looking for a way out.
This movie has a lot working against it. You can feel the budget’s restrictions in its shooting locations, but they never feel DIY-ed together to be noticeable. Whether it’s fighting in an office or fighting in a warehouse, Jason Clarke treats every scene with just the right amount of good-cop-gone-bad, reminiscent of Gerard Butler or even Gene Hackman. He growls his way through every scene but masterfully turns it around as he holds his young daughter.
Nick Robinson has arguably less and more to work with. One of the things I find interesting is the manager of Silk Road (named DreadPirateRoberts) wrote almost a full manifesto about what he’s doing. When taken out of context, it feels like libertarianism used as an excuse to empower drug lords. Still, Robinson’s monologues come directly from DPR’s posts so the words are in no way fictionalized, but so much of it comes across as political ranting it’s hard to create character from them. Robinson has the hard job of creating subtext through rants.
The film goes on at a decent clip, driving the story with few resting points. From the outside looking in, the movie feels like a cheap rush of crime thriller for the twenty-first century. I enjoyed it way more than I had any right to, but that’s because I knew the article it was based on. I saw every turn and pivot. That sense of self-fulfilling prophecy made the movie much more interesting and subtracting that out would lower this movie’s grade in my opinion. The murder-for-hire and police interrogations feel particularly low stakes in the grand scheme of things and a simple moral decay on both ends carries only so much gravitas. I liked it, but this movie had no right to be as good as I found it to be.
In Select Theaters, on Digital, and Video-On-Demand Friday, February 19th
